Hi,
Nigel McFarlane did it again. The one-man Mozilla
XUL promotion machine wiped up a new XUL article for
the Linux Insider's Developer's Toolbox Corner titled
"From Browser to Platform: Mozilla Rises".
Nigel writes:
The Mozilla Browser is built on top of the Mozilla
Platform. Just look in the "chrome" directory of your
current Mozilla install to see the browser sitting
there as a single file called communicator.jar or
browser.jar. Those files are just ZIP archives, each
holding a set of human-readable text files.
The Mozilla Platform itself is a set of programmable
objects and XML processors bound together into a
single program. Applications that exploit this
platform consist of images, XML and text files that
are interpreted at runtime when the platform starts.
Start the platform with one file name as an argument,
and a browser appears. Start it with another file
name, and an e-mail client appears.
Such application engines are not new. Many 4GL
database clients work that way -- and so do Smalltalk,
emacs, PostScript, Macromeda Flash and so on. What is
new with Mozilla is that apparently simple
technologies used in Web development, like XML, CSS
and JavaScript, are all equally applicable to Mozilla
applications. Instead of a Web page, you can build a
traditional user-oriented, GUI-based application with
these technologies. There's a huge ready-made Web
programmer audience for such application development.
There is an opportunity for Web developers to broaden
their skillset beyond what is now a very competitive
Web development market.
The first key to unlocking the value in the Mozilla
Platform is to see graphical user interfaces -- most
commonly called GUIs -- from a new angle.
Full story @
http://www.linuxinsider.com/perl/story/32404.html
- Gerald
PS: If you just tuned in Nigel's 700+ XUL Thriller is
now available in bookstores offline and online. For
more info see the XUL Alliance Bookshelf online @
http://xul.sourceforge.net/books.html or check out
Harry Fuecks "Rapid Application Development with
Mozilla" book review online @
http://www.phppatterns.com/index.php/article/articleview/91/1/12
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