At 00:43 05/20/2005 +0700, Tracy R Reed wrote: [snip of a bunch of stuff about Mozilla and Thunderbird] >I think I may have even seen a book on this [app development with Mozilla]
The book is called "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla", Nigel McFarlane, Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference (PTR). I got this book at one of the raffles about 6 months ago, and I still haven't finished plowing through it. The title is a misnomer. There is nothing rapid about developing applications with Mozilla. Due to the diverse nature of the assembled technologies, building apps (I won't say programs here) is obtuse, since obtuse is the kindest word I can think of right now. To me, rapid app development should be like a kid playing with Legos: there are a bunch of pre-built pieces with obvious ways that they can connect together, but you can use as many pieces as you want in unique combinations to create your project. The Mozilla platform doesn't do that. Most of the great stuff that is there is hidden away with arcane interfacing requirements. This is mostly a fault of it's origins, since it uses Microsoft style COM objects to do most of the work with glue logic being done by ECMAscript (Javascript). Then you throw in stuff like Web RDF, templates (not the C++ kind), etc. and suddenly there is too much info to keep in your head as compared to doing a single language application. To change or add to the deep underlying functionality, you need to write new XPCOM objects in C++. There is nothing rapid or trivial about that. The book doesn't address any of that either. Unless you are just adding some functionality to the browser but still keeping it basically a browser, I wouldn't use Mozilla to develop applications. Gus "I should turn this into a book review" Wirth -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
