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A Good Resource for Learning XUL & Javascript?

Posted by Cliff on from the ground-floor-learning dept.

RJabelman asks: "I'm trying to write a Mozilla extension, but I can't find a decent resource to learn from. Tutorials abound for packaging up an extension, and the web's littered with Javascript snippets to pretty up a web page, but there seems to be very little authoritative information for doing serious work with Javascript, XUL and Mozilla (and more specifically, manipulating XML). I can find my one true resource for every other language or API I've learned: but not this. Can anyone point me to theirs?"

3 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. OReilly book by mrblah · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's an OReilly book, if that helps.

  2. RAD With Mozilla, Bruce Perens OSS series by LOBOestepaRIO · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's fairly good, and available for free in PDF. http://phptr.com/promotion/1484?redir=1

  3. XUL links by nitro322 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!