XUL Weblog

..well, almost.

If you look at bug 294122, you will notice that support for MSYS has been added to Mozilla's build system.

The relevant build notes are here:
Building with MSYS, Attachment 184389

"Just running "make clean" on Cygwin takes almost 6 minutes, vs only 1 minute with MSYS."

MSYS is a Minimal UNIX-like SYStem from MingW. Together with msysDTK (developer toolkit), it can replace cygwin as the base Windows build environment.

The big advantage of MSYS is speed. If you have ever built Mozilla on Windows, you will have noticed the abhorrent performance of Cygwin's make. make forks (or spawns as it is called in Win32) itself many hundred times during the course of a build which takes ages to complete. In comparison, MSYS is much more light-weight, zooming through the Makefile hierarchy like there is no tomorrow.

MSYS and msysDTK are fairly complete for this task. /bin/sh, CVS, make, vim - all the basics are there.

As the bug report notes, an iconv check has been recently added to Mozilla's configure. So, unless you install iconv separately, you currently still need cygwin. Perhaps iconv could be added to the msysDTK or be made available otherwise to address this.

Posted by Sascha Schumann at 10:57 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

And here is how you get the Mozilla control to work inside IE.

Posted by Sascha Schumann at 20:45 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

This weblog has referenced the Mozilla SQL extension already multiple times. In this entry, you will find some actual code which uses that extension to provide a simple Mozilla-based client for a local or remote database. I will explain the source code from bottom to top, so be prepared -- we will dive right in.

Posted by Sascha Schumann at 13:00 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

For writing API documentation, there is hardly anything better than (a) either having the documentation inline along with the code or (b) having separate staff do the hard work of keeping the docs up-to-date. Because most of us don't have the luxury of (b), we get to settle for (a).

Posted by Sascha Schumann at 11:40 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

From reading Adam Lock's Mozilla ActiveX Project page it appears that it should be already possible to have Internet Explorer run XUL applications. Has anyone tried that yet? I'll definitely look into this over the next few days. I just wonder whether applications will be able to gain security privileges comparable to the chrome environment (probably not). This would help selling XUL to companies wishing to continue their standardization on IE as sole client.

Posted by Sascha Schumann at 10:57 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Any takers for Bugzilla entry #321099?

I suspect the bug is just too esoteric. It is always reproducible. Is not there enough data in the report? Or is there already too much? The testcase is absolutely minimalistic.

Posted by Sascha Schumann at 08:45 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

If you want to play with XULRunner, you can start using the Mozilla 1.8-based nightly builds. They are available for Linux/x86, Win32 and MacOS X.

XULRunner is the light-weight, stand-alone run-time for Mozilla-based applications. It is Mozilla without the browser.

As such, it can feature the whole range of Mozilla technologies, including extensions such as SQL support for MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQLite etc.

With XULRunner, you can make your XUL-application look like another desktop program. In addition to that, XULRunner does not contain the overhead of a slicky Firefox browser. You probably won't miss the bookmark feature in a XUL application.

To get started, visit this tutorial.

Posted by Sascha Schumann at 12:25 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Mozilla is a very flexible beast. We will have a quick look at the various ways to deliver an application to your users.

Posted by Sascha Schumann at 12:30 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)