XULRunner

Much Awesomeness

20after4 — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:22:24 -0500

I have recently discovered a couple of awesome developments which are worth mentioning:

The Awesome X Window Manager is an active light-weight tiling window manager based on dwm. Similar to wmii or ion but seemingly more advanced and very easy to use. Version 2 is available from Debian and Ubuntu repositories so you can simply apt-get install awesome ... now isn't that awesome?
Google has released an official version of Google Gadgets for Linux. It's still early in development but the code is open source (Under the terms of the Apache License v2.0)... They don't offer pre-packaged binaries, however, it looks reasonably easy to build it. Once I have a few minutes to play I will definitely be talking about the experience. This is especially exciting for me because it's similar to the WidgetRunner project that I dabbled with over a year ago. The documentation mentions XULRunner and Spidermonkey as dependencies so it seems like it's based on the Mozilla platform and that is awesome!

XULFolio

20after4 — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:05:57 -0600

XULRunner-based application for online portfolio management. XULFolio takes advantage of following tools and libraries:

Mozilla XULRunner development platform.
jQuery "The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library"

New Project: XULFolio

20after4 — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:04:31 -0600

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.

I will post up the code on SVN soon. I think that the CRYPTO.jsm and my simple JSON-RPC code might be useful to someone.

Troubleshooting XPCOM Component Registration

20after4 — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 07:57:41 -0600

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.

I'm posting this for future reference, and to hopefully give this link a little more "google juice" .... If you are having trouble with XPCOM registration, regxpcom, etc, this should help:
Troubleshooting XPCOM components registration

MozPad

20after4 — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 02:12:08 -0600

MozPad is a group of developers which was started by Matt at AllPeers to focus on development of the Mozilla development platform (and Mozilla's cross-platform runtime, XULRunner.)

More Information

More information about MozPad can be found at the following sites:

MozPad.org - the main project wiki.
MozPad moon - the project news aggregator.
mozilla.community.mozpad - community newsgroup
MozPad Dashboard - summary of mozpad activity and links to related resources.
The #mozpad IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org

Writing desktop applications with XULRunner and EXT

20after4 — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 07:55:04 -0500

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!

Feedback Request

20after4 — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 17:51:59 -0500

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.

PsycZilla

20after4 — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 02:36:49 -0500

About PSYC:

"Imagine smartly multicasted chat and conferencing, non-proprietary instant messaging, distributed social networking and data sharing. And now imagine all of this rolled into one. PSYC is an open source protocol and technology, bringing the useful and amazing aspects of several technologies, some of which have been proprietary too long, together." Read More.

PsycZilla is a PSYC Client for the Mozilla platform. PsycZilla started as a PSYC extension for Firefox and eventually branched out into standalone XULRunner applications for Linux and Mac OS X. You can read more about PsycZilla at http://www.psyc.us

Borderless XUL windows

20after4 — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 05:56:51 -0500

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...

Another XULRunner Wishlist

20after4 — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 16:30:21 -0500

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 ..... Update:I have started compiling the various wishlists into a single list on the MozPad wiki.