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Why 'alas'?

Yes, if you are referring strictly to toolbar menus, then menupopup , as well as menu, menubar, etc... are the elements you need. These also have a nice list of Javascript methods that can be called, including 'insertBefore' and 'insertAfter', while many more methods such as 'appendChild' can be called on individual menuitem elements in the menu.

I personally shy away from RDF and the use of mozilla datasources, because they don't really offer that much of use to me. Their performance is not very good, and they really overcomplicate the whole idea of data management. I would much rather simply interact with a regular database and use Javascript to populate menu and list items. If I need to maintain simple lists in memory, Javascript arrays do the job quite well.

What you need is appendItem and friends, or such methods as "insertItemAt", "insertBefore" and "removeAllItems" for the menulist element, along with addEventListener.

I agree that it is unfortunate there is no nice collection of HowTos for XUL/JS. To really document and explain all of the possibilities, it would take several books.

What you need is appendItem and friends, or such methods as "insertItemAt", "insertBefore" and "removeAllItems" for the menulist element, along with addEventListener.

I agree that it is unfortunate there is no nice collection of HowTos for XUL/JS. To really document and explain all of the possibilities, it would take several books.

What you need is appendItem and friends, or such methods as "insertItemAt", "insertBefore" and "removeAllItems" for the menulist element, along with addEventListener.

I agree that it is unfortunate there is no nice collection of HowTos for XUL/JS. To really document and explain all of the possibilities, it would take several books.

If you're just starting out with XUl, you may want to brish up on your JavaScript first. Although XUL itself is a rather straightforward markup language (albeit with many, many quirks), in order to make your app actually do anything, you'll need to write some JavaScript to control it. There are many, many Javascript resources out there, and I also recommend JavaScript: The Definitive Guide from O'Reilly.

Once you have that down, here are a few XUL sites I recommend:

Creating Application with Mozilla - Online version of O'Reilly's book. Great resource for beginners to follow through, but some of the examples no longer work due to changes in the APIs since the books release.

XUL Planet - An excellene resource for XUL developers of any level. This site contains a great tutorial for getting started and becoming familiar with the environment, as well as a definitive reference guide for XUL and XPCOM objects and functions.

XUL Planet Forum - This forum is also housed at the XUL Planet website, but it deserves separate mention. This is the only forum/newsgroup/list I've been able to find that's still active and populated with friendly and helpful souls. I've received helped there several times on problems I'd been working on for weeks or months.

There are also a few XUL-related newsgroups on mozilla's usenet server (eg, news://news.mozilla.org:563/netscape.public.dev.xu l), though not too many people use those groups anymore.

There's also Mozilla official XUL Programmer's Reference. This is a great reference resource, but it's not geared for beginners.

And finally, the mother of all example sites: http://www.hevanet.com/acorbin/xul/top.xul If you can't figure out how something work, this most likely has a working example.

Good luck!

If you're just starting out with XUl, you may want to brish up on your JavaScript first. Although XUL itself is a rather straightforward markup language (albeit with many, many quirks), in order to make your app actually do anything, you'll need to write some JavaScript to control it. There are many, many Javascript resources out there, and I also recommend JavaScript: The Definitive Guide from O'Reilly.

Once you have that down, here are a few XUL sites I recommend:

Creating Application with Mozilla - Online version of O'Reilly's book. Great resource for beginners to follow through, but some of the examples no longer work due to changes in the APIs since the books release.

XUL Planet - An excellene resource for XUL developers of any level. This site contains a great tutorial for getting started and becoming familiar with the environment, as well as a definitive reference guide for XUL and XPCOM objects and functions.

XUL Planet Forum - This forum is also housed at the XUL Planet website, but it deserves separate mention. This is the only forum/newsgroup/list I've been able to find that's still active and populated with friendly and helpful souls. I've received helped there several times on problems I'd been working on for weeks or months.

There are also a few XUL-related newsgroups on mozilla's usenet server (eg, news://news.mozilla.org:563/netscape.public.dev.xu l), though not too many people use those groups anymore.

There's also Mozilla official XUL Programmer's Reference. This is a great reference resource, but it's not geared for beginners.

And finally, the mother of all example sites: http://www.hevanet.com/acorbin/xul/top.xul If you can't figure out how something work, this most likely has a working example.

Good luck!

What I want to know, which nobody seems to document, is how to create menus dynamically in Firefox. Instead of specifying the menus statically in XML, I want to create them at runtime -- specifically, I want to create a top-level menu item and populate its submenu at runtime based on HTTP queries or something similar. I know it's possible, but I have not figured out how.

Try XulPlanet, it's the only resource on XUL that is actually working, for me at least. In my company, we're regularly delivering apps with XUL as a frontend and all developers use XulPlanet.

On the down side, welcome to the land of magic and wonder, where arcane bugs haunt the long forgotten planes of DOM...

XULplanet also looks like a good resource to me.

You can always start at mozilla and xulplanet

mozilla
xulplanet

As for the more advanced stuff, I'm not sure where.

Here is the doc I used. Xulplanet.com is pretty much the best resource for anything XUL.

I would say that XUL is more like HTML than RDF. However, you're right that Mozilla's framework has built-in support for querying RDF datastores (although primitive compared with Jena or Redland). In fact Mozilla internally represents bookmarks through RDF even though they are serialized in a pseudo-html syntax on disk (for compatibility reasons). The history, extension registry, and file system are also RDF-based. Mozilla may very well be the most widely distributed framework for accessing RDF datastores on the planet!

I would say that XUL is more like HTML than RDF. However, you're right that Mozilla's framework has built-in support for querying RDF datastores (although primitive compared with Jena or Redland). In fact Mozilla internally represents bookmarks through RDF even though they are serialized in a pseudo-html syntax on disk (for compatibility reasons). The history, extension registry, and file system are also RDF-based. Mozilla may very well be the most widely distributed framework for accessing RDF datastores on the planet!

I would say that XUL is more like HTML than RDF. However, you're right that Mozilla's framework has built-in support for querying RDF datastores (although primitive compared with Jena or Redland). In fact Mozilla internally represents bookmarks through RDF even though they are serialized in a pseudo-html syntax on disk (for compatibility reasons). The history, extension registry, and file system are also RDF-based. Mozilla may very well be the most widely distributed framework for accessing RDF datastores on the planet!

-l

-l

The place to get introduced to XUL: http://www.xulplanet.com They have a comprehensive tutorial.

Inline spellcheck was implemented for Mozilla Suite by Linspire recently. It will probably be included in future versions of Thunderbird (not necessarily in 1.0).

I've been thinking frequently that what would help spread linux like wildfire is network delivered applications that make the platform irrelevant.

Simple web based apps are nice, but there are many limitations such as not having a framework for interface, making developers write their own widgets or integrate other software after researching available solutions.

I've just started using XUL (pronounced 'zool') for an application that will load simply by visiting a url with mozilla/firefox. You can install local apps that have priveleged access to resources, but for my needs all data interaction will be handled by a central system.

If anyone could have a fully working computer that just worked reliably all the time with most software you could ever want available to you for the cost of internet access, I think *that* is the kind of appeal that would help cause accelerated growth in open souce adoption in the consumer market.

Check out XUL: http://xulplanet.com

If you know JavaScript and a little XML you should be able to write an extension for it yourself. I tried it recently and had a running extension within two days, counting installer problems because I didn't know that Firefox-only installers are a cinch.

Download one of the other bookmark manager extensions, see how bookmarks are manipulated, check the tutorial and references at XUL Planet (but ignore their installer instructions), and get hacking! Building the UI is easy using XUL widgets, and you only need JavaScript to run it. Send me a message if you get caught up in the installer.

well, not exactly our experience here. We have been trying to develop a system using XUL and JavaScript but we ran in multiple problems, that required almost always some kind of work around.

Don't get me wrong, I do think there's a LOT of potential in XUL. Specially, XBL has been wonderful to develop some data binded components that saved us a lot of time in the long run, and they were quite easy to develop.

However, theres a lack of maturity in some of it features that make them look as it they were an after thought, or just not really well designed. Templates have a lot of limitations, remote XUL just doesnt work right (or at least the docs that explain how to sign components are just too outdated), many errors result in segfaults (agree, the problem was in how we were using some components, but you shouldn't segfault in any case!!), theres no clear separation between components and services (I really don't understand why they don't share a common interface!), XBL lacks of obvious things (like a script tag, please). And honestly, javascript sucks to structure your code... we had to implement an include () directive to import other .js, there should be a way to do that in the language. And, there should be support for other datasources besides RDF.

And the worst part is that there are not many apps developed in XUL, so documentation (specially about XPCOM components) is really scarce. The reference is OK (most of the time), but you dont have a single example for most of the XPCOM components. A search in google usually returns C/IDL headers from the mozilla implementation or the reference at xulplanet ;).

I really hope XUL development speeds up. Its really a good platform, and the separation between presentation/data/logic really shows up. But as it is, its darn difficult, and slow, to develop for it (at least till you know most of the work arounds).

By the way, has anyone developed both in Luxor and mozilla XUL and have some insights in their pros and cons? (besides what the luxor page says, which of course I wont believe until I try it :P).

XUL Tutorial

The best one I know of is xulplanet.com. You can also google for some of the stuff from IBM (I think there was a series of 3 on using XPCOM); see bottom of this page.

PDFs of the book Rapid Application Development with Mozilla (look for "Download ... in PDF" on that page) from the publisher might help too, if you prefer going through that - or buy the book or something.

Note, though: devedge.netscape.com (the Netscape developer's site) appears to have been taken offline recently; so you'll need to go through web.archive.org if you find any results on that that look interesting.

(The folks on forums.mozillazine.org are usually quite nice too, if you're civil about things. Might be a better place to ask.)

: XUL is cool, but so far I haven't seen MANY
: great applications done with it.

Apparently there are still quite a few restrictions on web applications that use XUL. That's a good thing (security wise), but hopefully beyond Mozilla/XUL2.0 the moz developers will implement something that will ease development as well, without re-inventing ActiveX hell. It _is_ possible to write working web applications if you invest a lot of time and can live with a somewhat disjointed documentation. xulplanet.com is a good start. The Amazon Browser is pretty impressive (but not that useful in real life, I admit that). Don't miss The games at mozdev, they're tiny XUL applications running over HTTP as well. And Nextls XUL is a somewhat weird frontend for a client/server mp3/ogg jukebox, also in XUL over HTTP. So what other XUL webapps are out there, anyone?

Somebody (I think) has already done this. While it's not a plugin, it uses HTC (?). Here's a link to the implementation

http://xulplanet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1038

I don't use IE and rarely use Windows, so I haven't tried it. But I'd love to hear an explanation on why this works, and what HTC is.

I've done a fair bit of work in XUL. A CRM system, another database accessing interface and a user interface for an art project (basically a drawing app). XUL is cool. It's about as hard as learning xhtml + javascript (DOM) from scratch. The main problem as it stands is with lack of documentation. Also, XUL is a bit of a moving target - I've filed at least 2 bugs per app i've developed!

To give you an example, I was trying to load some valid xhtml into my document by inserting it directly into the DOM. All images and style elements in this document fragment weren't loaded! I ended up fixing it with something called XPConnect javascript but i needed to install my app for this to work.

A good place to check out is xulplanet. It's probably the most comprehensive XUL sites out there.

As far as power goes, firefox itself was written in XUL - so anything you can do in firefox you can do in XUL. Well, if it's installed XUL. If it's just loaded like a webpage then it's got the same security restrictions as webpages ie. no access to local files/clipboard etc.

This is what Microsoft must be afraid of: cross-platform user interfaces with pluggable scripting languages and super-easy application deployment. This is why they originally fought Netscape - they were afraid that Netscape would become a "platform" independent from the operating system layer. And now exactly that is happening, thanks to open source. The people who designed this stuff were some true visionaries.

The Spread Firefox initiative may seem like a trite marketing effort. But in reality, it is one of the best ways to enable people to switch to other platforms tomorrow. I really hope that the Firefox hackers will get SVG support ready soon, as this is one of the other key features that can have immediate amazing benefits.

What about XUL? I took a brief look at it a few months back, and it looked pretty good-- but I decided to wait until they had a developer GUI ('cause I'm a lazy bastard :) How does echo stack up to XUL, or would that be comparing apples to oranges?

It is there to allow you to use Mozilla/Firefox as an actual application development platform. For more information, look here.

Actually the mozilla team is working on it :
http://www.xulplanet.com/ndeakin/archive/2004/6/22 /

You are right, Mozilla should be very restrictive by default and very permissive if the user allows it. But that not specific to this browser, IE has implemented such features and :
- It doesn't work because users click "Yes" on every popup you throw at them (I've seen an friend on XP click yes on this personnal firewall message : "Do you want to allow access to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx on port xxx ?")
- It can be hacked (how many IE exploits use the IE secure area ? i'm sure it will be the same for gecko)

The 101 reasons are here.

Everyone keeps saying how far MS are behind mozilla based browsers in terms of features. But HTML doens't mean jack in the next round of the browser wars.

In the next round, the web is an Application Platform. XAML is what matters. While everyone using firefox thinks that they have a kickarse browser, It's only for the current web.

XAML is way better than XUL. And even within the XUL community there is a disgrunted feeling.

My personal rant with XUL is: Where is XUL's OLE/Opendoc replacement? It would be easy to just allow XUL embeding in xhtml - What an easy solution! But the mozilla editor doesn't support xhtml! only html 4!

Noone is listening to the users of XUL. and it sucks.

In order to complete a normal sized program, you would eventually have to be fluent in XML, JavaScript, CSS, RDF, DTD, DOM, XPCOM, XPConnect, JSLib, and other technologies.

They need to simplify it. I'm not learning that many different technologies just to complete a "normal sized program".

It's not exactly sockets, but you can do an awful lot with the XmlHttpRequest object. Microsoft did it first, I think, and Mozilla has a complete clone. Check out the XulPlanet documentation, the Mozilla documentation, the Microsoft documentation or this tutorial called Using the XML HTTP Request Object

The XmlHttpRequest object is poorly named. Really you're just making an HTTP request, and if the response happens to be XML, there are convenience functions for getting a fully-parsed DOM view of the document. If the response is anything else (plain text, JavaScript, Perl, HTML, etc.) you can do what you want with it, including calling eval() on it from a JavaScript script. You can do synchronous (blocking) or asynchronous (non-blocking) calls to your web server, and either be notified of completion by a callback for non-blocking calls, or just treat it like a function call for blocking calls. It's quite handy, and we have a project at work that makes extensive use of this technique. We have a "thick" or "rich" client application that runs in the web browser. Our client looks like a native application--it has table widgets, with clickable headers that resort the columns, it has a tree widget that looks like the tree in Windows Explorer, it supports drag-and-drop and custom context-menus, and if you open our application in a chrome-free browser window, it's almost possible to forget it's not native (the speed is usually what gives it away, the GUI is a little sluggish...). It works equally well in Mozilla, Firefox, IE 5.5+, and Netscape 7.1+ on Windows 9x, 2000, XP, and many flavours of GNU/Linux (tested on Gentoo and Redhat 7.3, and 8.0 using GNOME, KDE, and some kind of *Box wm). Well, "equally well" is a bit of a stretch. IE's implementation of the DOM is dog slow, so some things run a bit faster in the Gecko-based browsers, but all functionality is equally available in all the configurations listed above. We've managed to stay standards-compliant for the most part, and have abstracted away the quirks in IE, so as soon as Konqueror, Opera and $YOUR_FAVOURITE_BROWSER fully support JavaScript 1.5, DOM 2.0, and CSS 2.0, our app will work in your browser, too. (I don't know which parts these browsers are missing, so maybe our app already works there.)

The only remaining hurdle is to convince management that it should be open-sourced so that other people can use it, too. If you can't wait, you might want to check out SourceForge. There are some other widget kits available for building browser-based apps. We chose not to go with them because, at the time, they were too Alpha-ish, and we disagreed with some design decisions. Our decision not to use those projects has not been revisited for a while though, now that we are rather comitted to our in-house implementation, so things may have improved significantly since the last time I had a look.

Also, if you're going to actually build any significant JavaScript apps (we have more than 40k loc that turns out to be more than 1 meg of JavaScript to download), I highly recommend JSDoc. The main developer, Gabriel, has been very responsive and helpful, and the documentation that his scripts produce is excellent. Especially considering he builds JSDoc in his spare time, I can't compliment his work enough. Now that our codebase is too large for me to keep it all in my head, the API has saved a lot of my time.

Ian

1. Web clients vs. rich user interfaces

I think what you're really getting at is XUL, an XML format for describing user interfaces. It's theoretically toolkit-independent and there are at Windows, Gtk, and Swing (why!?) implementations.

Oh, and Microsoft has already ripped off XUL =)

Surely you could get MozDev to be (one of) the top level Certificate Authority(s) though, seeing as it's already the main repository for plugins. Maybe XULPlanet and a few others too, along the same lines as the SSL cert. verification model. Establish some trusted bodies and give them the issuing responsibilities.

Get these bodies to issue a cert. to each project and provide a mechanism for signing code, then plug the above CA servers into Mozilla, Firefox, etc., write some checking code (displaying warnings for unsigned code, for example) then you're done :)
Not quite that easy in practice though, I guess?

Firefox is the biggest XUL demo you can get, aside from Mozilla Seamonkey Suite, which I'm not entire ly sure whether or not is completely XUL based...

In any case, standalone XUL is unlikely, because it is built on Gecko for use with Gecko-embedding browsers and applications. XAML will be no different, it will be built into Windows for use by Windows applications.

But if you want to learn about XUL: XUL on Mozilla.org
XUL 1.0 specification
XULPlanet, a big non-Mozilla XUL resource (See also XULPlanet at mozdev.org for the time being)
Joy of XUL -- an overview of XUL.

The probable reason why XUL doesn't recieve the same hype as XAML? XUL is just a solution designed for a problem. Whereas, XAML is a solution looking for a problem -- it is just one of the bells and whistles to make Longhorn attractive.

1. I needed a richer widget set to work with. For example, I needed to use hierarchical trees to display our category list.
2. HTML is page oriented, so when the user moves from one page to another, a request must be sent to the server and page info sent back to the browser, which may cause delays in places where it is irritating the to user (you could probably work around this with sufficiently complicated JavaScript, but it would be tedious). XUL is for building applications, not individual pages, so it is much easier to download data in a big chunk and allow the user to move through multiple screens/tabs without having to touch the server every time.

I don't want to be feeding the troll, but seriously, you don't believe this, do you? IE has a history of breaking every conceivable W3C standard as Microsoft sees fit, and it's only because of Microsoft's monopoly that they can get away with it.

Have you ever tried to make any web page look the same in IE and any other browser? Surely, the very idea of being "the most compatible" is somewhat moot if there's no point of reference. Who (or what) do you think IE is compatible with?

And concerning which browser is "the best", there's always the classic list of 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot.

// Initializes the about dialog
function useragentswitcher_initializeAbout()
{
var latestVersion = 0;
var request = new XMLHttpRequest();

// This must be done to make generated content render
request.open("GET", "http://chrispederick.myacen.com/work/firebird/use ragent
switcher/version.txt", false);
request.send("");

// Initializes the about dialog
function useragentswitcher_initializeAbout()
{
var latestVersion = 0;
var request = new XMLHttpRequest();

// This must be done to make generated content render
request.open("GET", "http://chrispederick.myacen.com/work/firebird/use ragent
switcher/version.txt", false);
request.send("");

Get the TabBrowser extensions. Everything you could ever think of that you'd want tabs to do, these do it. And then some.

I also highly recommend the PrefBar add-on.

And for those with short attention spans. Remember when Red Hat tried to play the "consistency" game? The KDE group practically tore them a new one. Don't believe me? Google for that time period.

"Maybe we should consider some fundamental reorganisation. With everything split by application, each has its own way of doing things; what if there was some other way of doing things? What if application developers yielded ultimate control of their GUI to a separate project of some kind?"

It's called XUL. GLADE is something similiar. With some good front-end tools a reasonable compentent "designer" can worry about the interface, and the programmer could worry about everything else (kind of like the seperation going on in the web community).

The free community has already "addressed" the problem. Acceptance however is a different matter (remember the broha when Mozilla was being worked on, and how stupid all this was "We want a basic browser"?)

> Just having toggles to enable/disable javascript and java near the address bar would be excellent. Same with disabling plugins like flash. Just so you don't have to go through menus and preference boxes to do it every time...

Mozilla + PrefBar = just that.

So now they just lack tabbed browsing, type ahead/fast search, better text zooming on fixed-size text, real PNG support and the rest of the "to-do list".

XULPlanet

mozdev

Mozilla main site Somebody just pissed up my leg in this thread pointing out that Mozilla wasn't the first project that uses an markup language to describe GUIs. He may be right, but I don't think anybody else except Mozilla has such a kick-ass and complete implementation of the concept. Microsoft probably just has screenshots and they're still busy rewriting the XUL specification :-)

So, I use MapQuest now, works great. Yahoo (and any portal) would be well advised to check their site in a few minority browsers, especially the best one, if they want to maximize ad revenue.

I don't know about the domain problem. To be frank, I didn't do extensive tests (and I'm totally lost in the Mozilla codebase. Yes, shame on me, I'm a truly lousy coder). And yes, you're right, I'd forgotten that little icon. In fact, I think I'd dismissed the window the first time it appeared (like all those `` by submitting this form, you will be sending data on the Evil Internet. Honest. Do you really want to do that ? '' windows) and I rapidly overlooked the icon. Note that I cited this issue mostly for the record : my popup/banner ads/stupid js code problems are handled by Privoxy. These times, whatever browser I happen to use, I wouldn't dare using it without a filtering proxy to shield it. Still, this icon could be another reason to convince my friends to switch to a free browser. Thus, thanks to everyone for reminding me of that feature ;-)

I think you're confusing openoffice with firebird.