This XULRunner-based application will be used for managing an online photography portfolio.

Overview

Currently supports Zenfolio's API. I may add Flickr and SmugMug support in the future, I am striving to keep the interfaces abstract so that it will be easy to plug in to other sites by writing a simple API Compatibility Layer.

Update: SmugMug isn't allowing anyone to obtain an api key at this time. This puts them indefinitely out of consideration for this project. Also, Flickr could end up owned by Microsoft. I am strongly apposed to this acquisition and I do not intend to develop anything for a Microsoft-owned site. As long as this is a possibility, I won't be working on Flickr support.

Interesting Developments

• I developed a simple JSON-RPC library in javascript which uses Mozilla's new native JSON support.
• ZenFolio uses SHA-256 hashes for their challenge-response authentication scheme. This took quite a while to work out but once I figured out how to use nsICryptoHash then it all went pretty smoothly.
• I created a CRYPTO.jsm module to wrap up the hash generation functionality. In the process I got to play with the awesome new JavaScript code modules feature in XULRunner. This is similar to creating an XPCOM singleton component, however, it's much easier to implement.

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Today I tried my luck compiling a custom XPCOM Component for XULRunner. The component wouldn't load, simply leaving an error in the console "Failed to load XPCOM component: ...."

I was having a terrible time debugging the problem and I couldn't seem to find the relevant documentation. Finally I asked for help on the #mozpad irc chat room. Plasticmillion pointed me to the correct document that I couldn't seem to find on google for whatever reason.

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I have been experimenting with EXT JS in XULRunner. I'm using it to build yet another photo upload application, similar to some Firefox extensions that you may have seen such as Fireuploader. I don't have a lot of details to report, however, I really like using the EXT Javascript framework. It's a bit complicated at first but the interfaces that it produces are really slick. Once I have a working demo I plan to post it here as an example of what can be done with XULRunner and EXT. Stay tuned!

I'm interested in hearing from developers who are working with XULRunner. Tell me what troubles you, what parts need better documentation and other things that need improvement. I'm going to be writing documentation for MDC, as part of my Mozpad responsibilities. I'm simply looking for feedback so that I can choose which documents would be most helpful.

So I'm trying to make borderless desktop widgets with XULRunner. It's mostly working except for one strange limitation - I can't seem to get the windows to resize to less than 100px in height. If anyone has a clue how to make an XUL window that is smaller than 100px high, please let me know, I'm stumped. Update: I finally got it to work! This involved a combination of omitting width and height attributes from the xul window tag and then calling window.sizeToContent() in the window's load event handler.

Update #2: now I have round, borderless xul windows on linux, however, I don't have alpha blending. The alpha channel on my PNG icon seems to be ignored, see screenshot...

I just saw KaiRo's XULRunner Wishlist and I want to point out that he has some really really valid points and I share many of his wishes. Perhaps I can help somehow with Bug #68702 (Pipe-based IPC). I'm actually really disappointed to learn that this doesn't already work, stdio is such a, well, standard thing, I assumed it would already be working. This will be a huge obstacle which may prevent me from using XULRunner for a major project that I am working on. Hopefully I can help fix that bug or otherwise work around the issue. Anyway if you are concerned about XULRunner and you didn't yet read KaiRo's post, go check it out ..... More...

Some things I would love to see in XULRunner:

• Better cross-platform desktop integration. For example:
  • Support for customized dock menu entries on OS X.
    I am investigating this one. It may be possible without modifications to XULRunner.
  • Support for system tray icons on windows and linux.
    There is a patch for this somewhere in bugzilla. I will look into it further when I have the time to test out the patch.
• Tools to help with packaging XUL Applications for multiple platforms.
  It seems that XULExplorer is moving towards providing this
• A code library providing often-used features that we take for granted when developing for Firefox.

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