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02/08/2001 Archived Entry: "Burble about Mozilla and XUL"
... that I posted to the Anoraks list. If you want a potted take on cross-platform applications in Mozilla and the promise of MozOffice, read on...
(In a response to Ollie about
this ZDnet article)
Mozilla's front-end is made of XUL (UI definition, quite nice) tied together
with Javascript. I completely love the concept because I'm a simpleton, but
it IS a nice way of getting some of that interface & logic separation.
Unfortunately the implementation leaves a lot to be desired, though Mozilla
0.7 has already made big performance strides beyond the pile of slow,
resource-hogging pants that is Netscape 6. (However, it's still got a few
more strides to go before you'd introduce it to your desktop/mother)
The base idea is that Mozilla is more than just a browser, it's a
cross-platform runtime for client-side network apps, with a full-featured
widget set, different levels of development languages for building stuff
(you can build quite complex stuff out of Javascript, or go down to C++
level, or Java), and a ton of useful libraries for networking, XML, various
types of doc rendering (including HTML, of course) etc. And I like the idea
a lot (despite the widget rendering idea that Tim and I have been slagging
off in a different context) because it's cool for rapid development of xp
apps, and Mozilla also has nice installer stuff for installing extensions
rapidly over the web.
There are some genuinely interesting apps being developed with Mozilla -
most of them are at Mozdev (though half have yet to get off the drawing
board) and there's also XMLTerm (crossing a CLI shell and a GUI) and
ActiveState's Komodo. However, the MozOffice does all the right things to
trigger warning noises:
And I also have to state my *infuriation* that, despite all the promises of
Mozilla now being a completely configurable browser (I put a button with a
little Yoz-icon on the browser toolbar, clicking it redirected the browser
to my homepage, literally took me all of 5 minutes in the browser XUL) the
Javascript code that most of the apps are written in IS NOT FUCKING
COMMENTED. I want to do cool stuff to the mail client, but have I *any* idea
how the bugger works? Pah.
-- Yoz