Xpcom

This is a public service announcement for those people interested in the future of JavaXPCOM. JavaXPCOM has been disabled and will likely to removed from the Mozilla source tree in the future. See Benjamin Smedberg’s newsgroup post for more details.

If you’ve developed applications or extensions using the Mozilla platform, you know that there are tons of services and APIs available. We use those same capabilities when building Fennec. However, there are times when the default platform behavior is not desirable on mobile devices. When that happens, we could hack up our own system, or we could re-implement the platform APIs to suit our needs. We try to do the latter.

The newest official XULRunner has been released. XULRunner 1.9.0.11 matches the Firefox 3.0.11 release. For XULRunner developers, most of the changes in 1.9.0.11 are related to security and stability fixes. SQLite was upgraded to version 3.6.7.

Mozdev and Mozilla Europe have teamed up to create a Firefox Mobile (Fennec) Add-ons Challenge. The goal is to create or port add-ons to Fennec. You only need to propose a concept for now, but you’ll need to get the add-on ready for the upcoming Mozilla/Maemo developer weekend in Copenhagen on May 30-31.

I decided to take a detour in my XULRunner session at MozCamp. I have done several XULRunner talks over the last few years. I usually focus on the functionality built into the platform and discuss the benefits of using Mozilla technologies to develop applications.

Building things with the Mozilla Platform usually involves dealing with some boilerplate. Extensions have install and chrome manifests and overlays. XULRunner applications have application and chrome manifests and default preferences. XPCOM, even the simpler JavaScript XPCOM, has modules, factories and categories. It’s more than enough to slow developers down, especially new-to-Mozilla developers.

A while ago I posted about getting XULRunner builds to coincide with Firefox milestones. Work has been moving ahead on the goal. In fact, we have XULRunner 1.9 RC2 binary runtimes and SDKs available for testing. If you use XULRunner, or want to use XULRunner, you should grab these builds and give them a spin. Let us know (file bugs) if you see something wrong.