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XULRunner Developer Preview Release Available

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the build-it-and-they-might-use-it dept.

TeachingMachines writes "A stable developer preview release of XULRunner 1.8.0.1 is now available. Based on the Firefox 1.5.0.1 codebase, it is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. From the Mozilla Developer Center (beta): "XULRunner is a Mozilla runtime package that can be used to bootstrap XUL+XPCOM applications that are as rich as Firefox and Thunderbird. It will provide mechanisms for installing, upgrading, and uninstalling these applications. XULRunner will also provide libxul, a solution which allows the embedding of Mozilla technologies in other projects and products." Help with programming with XUL and its related technologies can be found at XULPlanet. Beginning programmers will benefit especially from the XUL Tutorial. Also check out the XUL Element Reference to get an idea of what's available. "

A couple of other resources are worth mentioning. First, there is the XUL Programmer's Reference Manual which covers interface elements for XUL version 1.0. "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" is available for download at Bruce Perens' Open Source Series page. If you get the book, make sure to check out the errata. Unfortunately, the author Nigel McFarlane has passed away, so this is likely the final version. One final reference, "Creating Applications with Mozilla," is available here.

For those individuals who are looking for an extremely powerful application framework that is relatively easy to use, Mozilla is definitely worth a look.

8 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Also worth mentioning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    PyXPCOM, for Python-scriptable XUL applications, should be available shortly.

  2. XULRunner future. by Tei · · Score: 4, Informative

    Even if Mozilla evolve to XForms base, will be posible to continue XULRunner as a separate project. So XUL is here to stay.

    XUL is very good RAD tool. Much.. much much better than HTML. Because with HTML you sould care about styles and other miscelanea problemas, and becasue with HTML you badly emulate OS widgets, with XUL you use OS widgets.

    Also good bonuses are easy to code with javascript, and the integration with XML (indeed!).

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    -Woof woof woof!

  3. XUL: WIkipedia by eltoyoboyo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here is the Wikipedia article on XUL. I could have used this link on the PERL 6 web site since the documentation on PARROT and PUGS are composed in XUL. This was my first introduction to the format. The documents opened in Mozilla, but not in IE. While the arguement has been made here that you should only use Mozilla, why alienate a huge chunk of users without helping them along? Also, if you are going to publish in XUL, do not assume the casual user knows what the format and reader is. The Filext.com site did not yet have a listing or recommended reader for the XUL files.

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    Have you Meta Moderated t
  4. Re:What is the language? by Bogtha · · Score: 4, Informative

    XUL is an XML-based language that lets you define a user interface for a program. You hook it all together with lots of things web developers already know - it uses Javascript, the DOM 2 Event model, extensions to CSS, etc. You can use it to build stand-alone applications with XULRunner, or extend existing XUL applications like Firefox.

    Frequently when people talk about XUL, they mean the whole system that makes XUL work - which includes the Javascript, CSS etc. "XULRunner" doesn't "run" XUL, it takes the user interface definition files defined in XUL, and executes the Javascript, renders the CSS, etc, to make it all work properly. XUL is just one component in the grand scheme of things.

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    Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
  5. Re:This is what lost the browser wars by Bogtha · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, it's not a nice platform. I can assume you've noticed this based on your "it's decent enough" comment. It's a horrible platform.

    Decent enough for browser plugins. Decent enough if you are building an application that is very closely related to browsing. I wouldn't choose it for building general-purpose applications, no.

    I recently discovered that JavaScript supports closures - which helped explain the horrible memory leaks I was experiencing with JavaScript. Stuff that was supposed to leave scope didn't because it wound up in a closure.

    Well no, you might expect it to leave scope, if you assumed Javascript worked like some other language that doesn't support closures, but that's not the way Javascript works, so it's not supposed to leave scope.

    Unfortunately for me, I've never figured out exactly WHAT the closure takes with it.

    Richard Cornford wrote a decent explanation.

    XUL is supposed to make cross-platform support easier. Instead it ensures that Firefox just feels wrong on all platforms.

    I think that's an implementation detail rather than anything intrinsic to XUL itself. There was an experimental "KaXUL" to implement XUL within KDE and Konqueror a few years back, but I don't think anything came of it. As far as I know, there's nothing stopping a XUL implementation from rendering XUL applications with native widgets, it's just the people who built the only functional implementation chose not to.

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    Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
  6. Download size by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The download size of XULRunner is larger than Firefox because firefox currently has an installer with optimal 7zip compression and the XULRunner developer preview is just packed in a ZIP. The installed size of XULRunner is smaller than Firefox and the future installer work for XULRunner should compress the archive comparably.

  7. XULRunner SDK is in the roadmap by bsmedberg · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'd like to remind readers that this is preview release, and there are many aspects of this platform that are not complete, including a set of tools which will be packaged up as the XULRunner SDK. I am fully aware that you can't have a platform without excellent developer tools and documentation, and we're working to get all of those resources in place in the next year.

  8. Re:Dev environment by Myen · · Score: 2, Informative

    You might be interested in XPCShell (err, not sure if comes with the Gecko SDK and/or the suite; all I know is building Firefox yourself seems to make it). It's basically a XPCOM enabled JS shell. Of course, that means things like window are still undefined... that doesn't make sense unless you actually have a window :)

    As for making up small bits of XUL, the extension developer's extension has a editor (it basically has a frame that loads whatever you type into a textbox in). Doesn't work too well with dynamic stuff (every time you edit, it reloads that window...), but is good as a quick syntax checker.