Songbird Source Released

Rinisari writes "The source for Songbird, a music-oriented XULRunner application, is now available via Subversion. Rob Lord, CEO of Pioneers of the Inevitable, released the source for the not-yet-0.2 version of the music player, which integrates a music library and the facility to purchase and download music from a variety of vendors. If you haven't heard of it, read the features list and try it out. Slashdot previously mentioned Songbird when it was released as a preview in February."

Comments

List of XUL Applications?

[AKAImBatman]

SongBird just goes to show what XUL can really do. Most people shun it with a, "Coding serious applications in JavaScript? Yeah, right." But with the XPCOM Standard Library as a foundation, the XUL platform is really a great way to build applications. (There's a really cool application here that shows off XUL's abilities.)

XULRunner is still a problem, though. It's not clear to most programmers that XUL applications can function just as well standing alone as in a browser. Songbird is a great start, but does anyone know if there's a list of existing XULRunner applications? If such a list existed, it would be a lot easier to show people what XUL can do just by pointing them to a single URL.

Re:List of XUL Applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people shun it with a, "Coding serious applications in JavaScript? Yeah, right."

And for good reason! XUL is a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible system.

Crap, now I have to back that up with reasons, don't I? And the fact that I hate JavaScript really doesn't count, does it?

You can think of XUL as being almost exactly like VB, except without any nice GUI tools for building UIs. Almost all the things people hate about VB also apply to XUL.

But anyway, that's rather vague. How about some specific reasons?

First off, XUL is rendered using the same rendering engine as Firefox uses for rendering webpages. Yes, when you're looking at Firefox, everything you see is rendered by Gecko. That includes the menu, the toolbars, the tabs, and the webpage itself. This mixing of UI and webpages is just asking for security holes. The webpage is embedded in what is practically an IFRAME within the XUL document. There have already been a number of security exploits caused by webpages elevating their privileges into the "chrome" security level. If ActiveX has taught us anything, there will likely be more.

This relates directly to the next problem: because the entire interface is implemented using Gecko, the widgets aren't native. They feel out of place. Gecko does an amazing job of making the widgets look almost-right, but they're still not native and they still don't look quite right, even on Windows (most work spent on this) and GTK (second most work). And forget about Mac OS X, it's not even close!

But the real problem with not using native widgets is that XUL doesn't get the benefit of a platform's accessibility features. Yes, they have some hacks that attempt to stitch XUL widgets back to a platform's native accessibility system, but this means that they're chasing whatever new features are added. Right click on a native text field on my Windows system, I get the full set of Unicode editing features for dealing with BIDI text. Right click on a Firefox text field, and it's not there.

And, finally, JavaScript. You knew it was coming. But I'm not going to go after the language, I'm going to complain about the JavaScript interpretor that Mozilla uses. Most of the widgets are implemented by using JavaScript glue to access native code using XPConnect. Some widgets are implemented almost entirely in JavaScript - this is why the progress meter under Windows looks completely wrong. The concept of having native code do the heavy lifting and using a scripting language to glue everything together is a very good idea.

But that turns out to be a problem. If you want to write a cross-platform XUL application, you can only use JavaScript since that's what XULRunner provides. (Keep in mind, if you want to run on every platform XULRunner runs on, it's JavaScript or else.) Otherwise you'll have to compile for every platform, and you can only rely on the core XPCOM objects to be available. JavaScript is an interpretted language. And it's slllllllow. And - here's the most important part - in Mozilla, it's strictly single-threaded.

Now, combine that up above with JavaScript being used to implement some widgets. Plus, the thread used to run chrome JavaScript is the UI thread - the thread that receives messages from the windowing system. This means that if an application is using JavaScript to do heavy lifting, the application will literally freeze while it can no longer accept messages. The windows will stop redrawing. Clicks will be ignored. Nothing will happen until the JavaScript finishes and the UI thread can start handling messages again.

Trying to write XUL applications that don't do things that are already implemented as part of the core XUL system is mostly a waste of time. XUL works best if you can write native code for the heavy lifting and use JavaScript soley for the UI. Unfortunately, that makes your application non-portable - something XUL is supposed to help solve.

Re:List of XUL Applications?

[AKAImBatman]

What an impassioned rant! With all the energy and time you put into it, I really feel sorry that's it's so incredibly wrong. :(

because the entire interface is implemented using Gecko, the widgets aren't native.

As it so happens, the widgets are native. Mozilla exposes the underlying implementation. Which is why buttons look like Windows, Mac, or GTK+ buttons. The caveat to this is that you can create XUL buttons/components that are entirely virtual. These components are generally used to produce skins like that used in Firefox. But most XUL applications actually rely on the native components instead. Which is why the Amazon browser I linked to looks like a native Windows app.

JavaScript is an interpretted language. And it's slllllllow.

It's also just glue. All the heavy lifting is done by the XPCOM components, which are FAAAAAASSSST.

This means that if an application is using JavaScript to do heavy lifting, the application will literally freeze while it can no longer accept messages. The windows will stop redrawing. Clicks will be ignored. Nothing will happen until the JavaScript finishes and the UI thread can start handling messages again.

Putting aside for a moment that this is an issue in all GUI programming, Mozilla does support multithreading. It just doesn't do it at the Javascript level. Threads are pushed down to the XPCom level instead, where they do the most good. (e.g. The XmlHttpRequest object can run synchronously or asynchronously.) If you really must multithread your JavaScript app, then cooperative multithreading is easy to do. Timed call-backs allow you to regain control whenever you need it, or in spurts if you'll be processing for a long period of time.

Re:List of XUL Applications?

[generic-man]

Open Safari on Mac OS X 10.4. Start VoiceOver (CMD+F5 or CMD+FN+F5 on a laptop). Notice how virtually every UI control has enough metadata to let Mac OS X know what it is.

Open Firefox (or Camino). Start VoiceOver. Notice how absolutely nothing in the web page display area is interpreted as a Cocoa widget. Notice how in the web page display area, checkboxes, drop-downs, text fields, and any other controls lack any access to Cocoa services such as spell checking and Dictionary. The same lack of OS-native widgets is apparent in Firefox for Windows, though GTK does a much better job of emulating the look of these widgets, if not the feel.

If it looks like a native app, it's not necessarily a native app.

awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

we can finally play music on our pcs!

bugs, questions etc etc

[xsst4]

if you guy's are having any bugs or anything just file them at bugzilla.songbirdnest.com and if you guy's have any questions or just want to idle be sure to connect your clients to irc.landoleet.org and join us in #songbird. Thanks have a good one! --Inc

songbird?

[Lachryma]

Oh right, the music player with the farting bird logo.

Re:songbird?

[LiquidCoooled]

If you think the original logo was bad, take a look at the songbird bugzilla page.

THey have the logo with cramps, the runs and throwing up.

lovely.

Why XUL?

[kahei]

Is XUL a good application platform? If so, why?

It doesn't seem to have much to reccommend it at first glance -- a language that lacks features and performance (javascript) a runtime that's bulky (mozilla), and worst of all a real case of Java-itis -- XML files and source files that endlessly have to be kept in sync and bundled together, no self-documentation and no metadata.

I ask because I tried porting a semi-complicated IE plugin to XUL and had to give up -- admittedly, I had to give up because of limitations in the HTML renderer, but long before then I had learned to dread the process of hooking into Mozilla at all. And that's saying something, considering that the original IE plugin was entirely made of hand-written COM, written against IE's none-too-predictable interfaces.

So, why XUL? I appreciate that you _could_ write an application in it, but what's the unique selling point that justifies all the work?

Re:What's the big deal?

[aymanh]

Erm, I think you are missing the point, Songbird is a stand-alone music player, some of its key features that give it special interest here are:

• Written in XUL and JavaScript.
• Runs on top of Mozilla's XULRunner platform.
• Cross-platform, can run on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X (among the others).

It can be seen as a proof of concept on how general purpose multi-platform applications can be developed on top of XULRunner. Songbird also lets you visit online music stores and organize your music library, which makes it an Open Source alternative to iTunes.

Enough to deserve /.'s interest I guess.

Re:What's the big deal?

[Stealth Dave]

so what's new about any of this?

This one goes to eleven

Re:What's the big deal?

[j1mc]

While I wouldn't get too excited about being able to just search the web through a browser within a media-player, I think that there's more to Songbird than just that.

On the Linux front, Songbird will give us a media player with an attractive front end, all of the standard rip-organize-burn capabilities, plus the ability to purchase music from online music stores. Not to knock the current Linux offerings (I'm currently an Amarok user), but the UI's aren't as attractive as Songbird's UI (yes, XMMS is slick-looking, but those buttons are so small . . . ), and AFAIK, the ability to buy music from online music stores through a Linux app is slim to none.

As for iTunes and Windows Media Player, they each lock you into their own music stores (the iTunes Music Store and the MTV-powered Urge, respectively). Songbird is going to allow you to purchase music from a wider array of online music stores from the outset, and online music stores will be able to write plugins to make them searchable from within Songbird. From the website . . . "Web page authors will be able to publish playlists and transfer MP3s into Songbird to build digital music stores like eMusic, music subscription services like Yahoo! Music Unlimited, virtual jamming services like Ninjam, playlist sharing services like WebJay and more."

And, of course, neither iTunes nor WMP plays natively under Linux. All in all, a strong cross-platform app like this just makes Linux that much more viable for everyday desktop users.

Re:Songbird is barely usable

[Z0mb1eman]

downloading from petshopboys.com will freeze songbird.

That's a feature.