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Rapid Application Development with Mozilla
The Basics Rapid Application Development with Mozilla (hereafter RADM) centers on XUL, Mozilla's XML dialect for describing GUIs. Other Mozilla components, like XBL and RDF, are described mainly in terms of how they plug into XUL. Each chapter presents and explains a component, then shows it in action by using it in an example application (a web-page annotator) developed throughout the book. Chapter conclusions take the form of debugging hints; as McFarlane ruefully notes, most errors cause Mozilla to silently do nothing, making debugging a chore.
The first half of RADM covers basic XUL use -- the usual complement of widgets with CSS to style them and JavaScript to manipulate them. McFarlane does assume previous exposure to basic HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but extensive experience isn't required. At each step McFarlane does a good job explaining what's similar to HTML (e.g. most DOM stuff) and what isn't (e.g. the layout model). A few components have no real analog in the HTML model, like Mozilla's command dispatch system, so they're presented from the ground up.
The Back EndThe second half of the book leans more toward the back end: using RDF for registries and template data; piping data into XUL with overlays, templates, and XBL; using and implementing XPCOM components; and deploying applications built on Mozilla.
McFarlane's RDF tutorial is one of the best I've seen. He starts off on the right foot by introducing things in terms of a directed graph, with lots of examples and diagrams. Only after eighteen pages of that does he introduce the RDF/XML syntax. His explanation of RDF/XML is unusually lucid, quite a feat considering how hairy RDF/XML gets. (Disclaimer: I've had past experience with RDF, so I wasn't reading this as a beginner -- in other words, YMMV.)
In the succeeding chapters, RDF is applied within the various Mozilla arenas, like XUL overlays and package installation, where it's used to store config information. The centerpiece of RDF in Mozilla, though, is in its use to create data-driven XUL files through XUL templates.
The chapter on templates runs to sixty-plus pages, and it's worth it. McFarlane covers things I haven't seen covered anywhere else. For instance, he describes the algorithm the RDF query engine uses to evaluate queries, so that you can better understand what kind of queries you can construct. This is crucial information because the query syntax allows a lot of queries that are logically reasonable, but won't actually work.
This points to a strength of RADM: McFarlane doesn't hesitate to criticize Mozilla where necessary. Throughout the book, he flags incomplete features, buggy implementations, and other gotchas, such as security restrictions surrounding RDF that make it all but useless for remote scenarios.
(Incidentally, McFarlane explicitly disclaims coverage of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, sticking to Mozilla 1.4, but in practice everything I've tried has worked fine in Firefox 0.8.)
Two Out Of Three Ain't BadSo, does RADM manage to accomplish its goals of being a conceptual overview, tutorial, and reference? I'd give it two out of three.
As a conceptual overview, RADM shines. McFarlane is at his best when comparing and contrasting closely related components, like overlays, templates, and XBL, all of which extend XUL but do it in different ways. I was left with a good picture of what can and can't be done in Mozilla.
As a tutorial, RADM is solidly useful. The example-application sections cover a surprisingly large amount of ground -- more than enough to get a developer new to Mozilla up and running. McFarlane chose a good subset to present as examples; still, all of his clear writing can't paper over the fact that Mozilla is really complicated, not just internally, but in the interface it presents to developers using it as a platform.
As a reference, RADM stumbles. The index is slim -- a mere eighteen pages after 752 pages of content -- which makes small chunks of information hard to find. This is mitigated by a detailed and well-organized table of contents. After a few weeks of use, I find myself turning to the contents first, and only trying the index if I have to.
Fundamentally, though, RADM isn't really a reference book, and definitely not a "quick reference." You'd be better off using a good site like XULPlanet for quick what-arguments-does-that-method-take checks, and reserving RADM for in-depth explanations.
ConclusionRADM is published in Bruce Perens' Open Source Series at Prentice Hall under the Open Publication License. After a few months of letting the book sell on its own, they'll post the PDF of the entire book online. Is it worth buying in print? Given that it's more of a sit-down-and-read book than a quick-reference guide, I'd say so.
If you're considering Mozilla as a platform, I'd recommend RADM for its reasonable balance that shows Mozilla's strengths and weaknesses. If you're already sold on Mozilla and just want to wrap your head around it and start building an app on it, RADM is the book for you.
You can purchase Rapid Application Development with Mozilla from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page
I'll take less bugs over rapid development any day.
I think its time for the dev community to embrace XUL as a cross-platform development tool. Too much is made of Qt and GTK - both are great, don't get me wrong..but XUL just doesn't get it's due respect.
The single feature that I wish I could get with my applications is the web-installer that Mozilla has for its install. It allows you to stop and resume a download and it would allow people with crappy dialups to download large files without having to restart after every disconnect.
If I could build an installer with mozilla that would let me do this with _any_ application, that would be golden!!
RADM is published in Bruce Perens' Open Source Series at Prentice Hall under the Open Publication License.
Doesn't look like a very open license to me.
Why?
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
So why exactly should I use Mozilla for RAD?
Looks like it's time for me to stop shopping Home Depot and supporting Lowe's! Thanks for the tipoff.
Lindows Steals Copyrighted Art and Promotes Porn
And for those who've forgotten recent history. Remember all those people berating mozilla for all their cross-platform work, and just give us the browser. Now here we are with a rich toolkit that can run up against anything Microsoft can produce.
Something that either would be behind, or none existant if the developers had listened to their critics.
This is one of the reasons developers shouldn't pay attention to armchair critics. Critics more than anything else, are working from incomplete, or inaccurate, or just plain wrong information. just look at the binary vs open source drivers issue with the Linux kernel.
Personally I'd like to see the application logic live in web services (as in WSDL/SOAP), with WS-Security support for authentication.
.Net Windows Forms apps on Windows and Pocket PC, J2ME on PalmOS and java phone devices, AppleScript Studio on MacOS X, and all sorts of other things (eg. our portal has a RAD framework for portlets, and it can slurp up web services with no trouble, and I'm sure there must be at least one BREW dev environment with support for them).
Then the presentation layer could be done in something like Mozilla/XUL on Linux,
Mozilla/XUL on Linux, .Net Windows Forms apps on Windows and Pocket PC, J2ME on PalmOS and java phone devices, AppleScript Studio on MacOS X
Uhh, Mozilla/XUL runs on Linux, Windows and MacOS X. Why would you develop three different times when you could do it once?
Actually there's always one thing I've wanted to know. Can you remotely deliver these XUL's to the browser, so when you start up it pulls it off a server somewere. Or is this strictly a local thing?
Like everything else I've seen on XUL, the intro this book hypes how you can build standalone apps with XUL, which don't need to be Mozilla extensions.... and then says "but we're not going to do that."
Hi. THAT'S THE PART I WANT TO LEARN. The rest is just syntax, it's XML and javascript and it's really not that hard, if you keep a reference handy (and XUL Planet seems pretty nifty for this) you can make it up as you go along.
But how do I get started building a standalone app? Where do I get just the mozilla libraries? HELP.
But back to the rest of what you were writing...Could you post a more specific pointer to IBM's J9 one? That's what I'm running on my Tungsten T3 already, and if I could run that on my iPaq h4350 (ARM-based PocketPC 2003), I can do a real comparison and see if it's suitable for our applications.
Firefox is much faster and slightly more featureful than the browser component of the Mozilla suite. Saying XUL is slow because Mozilla is slow is like saying C++ is slow because your insertion sort code sorts slowly.
The shareholder is always right.