Hello, Brendan Eich (Mozilla's Chief Architect) follows up on last month's Mozilla Day talk titled "Mozilla's Future" in response to Boris Zbarsky's (Mozilla Volunteer and Hacker Extraordinaire) post asking "What are the goals of Mozilla.org?".
Brendan writes: At the same time, starting now and working closely with other open source hackers, build a new, unified desktop/web application platform from pieces of Mozilla and GNOME code, starting now. Share code and effort; avoid big rewrites. Use standards where possible, including the parts of XUL that are being specified now. This new platform might even deserve the "Mozilla 2.0" title. This new platform must include an advanced rendering layer with hardware acceleration, fancy effects, animation, video, etc. We should use what works now, with as much cross-platform leverage (OpenGL), filling in gaps on some platforms, and again (always) avoid long-pole scheduling dependencies where the entire subsystem must be rewritten. Another characteristic of this new platform: high-level programming language independence, with a good choice of "managed code" runtimes (Java, Mono C#, JS2, ...) for type-safe buffer-overrun-free programming. We must not keep losing fingers and toes to C and C++; that approach is a money loser compared to .NET. A crucial features of this new platform: the GUI toolkit must be able to blend in among native apps, at least on Windows and Linux, ideally on Mac too. There should be a well-specified XML syntax and semantics for creating user interfaces (XUL) and graphics (SVG or something like it, but unified), and for composing tags from DOM trees (XBL). There must be a low-cost migration path from XUL today to this future language. I've been busy laying groundwork, building bridges between different open source projects. It's still too early to say exactly how things will turn out. I don't want to make promises that I can't keep, and a lot of planets have to align still. But there is interest among other key projects' leaders. I think a number of smart folks see the need for alliance against the hegemon. This platform play would address (5-6) by marrying, as much as allying, GNOME, Mozilla, and perhaps Mono -- bringing cross-platform code and development to the Linux side, and native next-generation GNOME look and feel to Mozilla. It would build something we've been unable to build in a compelling or complete way by ourselves: a development platform for arbitrary third party web and desktop apps. The time frame for this plan is now, with working code by 2nd half of this year. Otherwise we're sliding into next year, in danger of being too late to gain mindshare before Longhorn's inevitability wins the day for XAML, etc. So, if this is to succeed, we have major concurrent development challenges ahead. Full story @ http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.mozilla.devel.seamonkey/2865 What's your take on it. Can Mozilla compete against the-desktop-is-the-browser offerings such as Gnome or KDE or against the-runtime-is-the-browser offerings such as Mono, Java or Flash? Join the discussion on xul-talk. - Gerald PS: The O'Reilly bloggers seem to (re)discover Mozilla and XUL lately. See the blog story/article by Jono Bacon titled "Mozilla and the potential for interaction" online @ http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4654 ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ xul-announce mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xul-announce
