Creating Applications with Mozilla (Paperback)

~ (Author), Brian King (Author), Ian Oeschger (Author), Pete Collins (Author), Eric Murphy (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Mozilla is not just a browser. Mozilla is also a framework that allows developers to create cross-platform applications. Creating Applications with Mozilla explains how applications are created with Mozilla and provides step-by-step information about how you can create your own programs using Mozilla's powerful cross-platform development framework. Working through the book, you are introduced to the Mozilla development environment and after installing Mozilla, you quickly learn to create simple applications. After the initial satisfaction of developing your own portable applications, the book branches into topics on modular development and packaging your application. In order to build more complex applications, coverage of XUL, JavaScript, and CSS allow you to discover how to customize and build out your application shell. The second half of the book explores more advanced topics including UI enhancement, localization, and remote distribution.

About the Author

Boswell has been involved in the Mozilla community for over three years.

Oeschger is senior principal writer at Netscape Communications, where mozilla.org was started over three years ago.

Murphy has been doing Mozilla development since spring 2000. Eric is looking forward to joining the work force in 2002 with a recent computer science degree from the University of Northern Iowa.

Collins has been involved with the Mozilla project since April 1999 as a contributor to the editor module. Currently, Pete is a software engineer employed by WorldGate.

Martin Plimmer is a journalist, broadcaster and author of the fictionalized memoir "King of the Castle," Once, while in the waiting room of a hospital after banging his head, Martin found a two-year-old magazine open at an article he had written on the subject of headaches.
Brian King is an award-winning pioneer of radio fly-on-the-wall documentaries; the producer of hundreds of programs for BBC Radio, including the long-running series "On the Ropes" and also, coincidentally, presented by Martin Plimmer.

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (September 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596000529
• ISBN-13: 978-0596000523
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #655,740 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Extremely frustrating, like most Mozilla documentation, December 3, 2002

By	S. Dutton "Sam Dutton" (London, England United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It's doubtful that, on its own, Creating Applications with Mozilla would enable a developer -- even with a reasonable knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS and C++ -- to do anything interesting with Mozilla. It certainly won't teach you how to create templates, package applications, or even use JSLib (which should be simple!), let alone write XBL or manipulate RDF files.

To be realistic, however, this book is often more handy than using Mozilla documentation online, and it has the usual high quality O'Reilly binding, paper, type design and layout. Buy it if someone else is paying or if you do a lot of Mozilla programming.

In a nutshell, the main problems I had with the book are as follows.

1. Technical writing should be judged in adversity -- how well it handles the hard stuff -- and on that count, this book fails miserably. When the going gets tough, the explanations become impenetrable and seem to be "preaching to the choir", assuming a deep knowledge of Mozilla programming. Even relatively simple concepts,such as the chrome URL, are poorly explained, and much of the sample code and technical reference material is, unnecessarily complex.

2. Much of the material is limited and incomplete: there are odd gaps in explanations, unenlightening overview sections (such as the description of using Perl with Mozilla), methods and properties listed with limited information (or no information) about their implementation, and incomplete references (such as the list of Mozilla CSS extensions). Crucial information (you can't manipulate datasources unless working via a chrome URL, for example) is often missing or buried.

3.There are numerous typos: misspellings, incorrect punctuation and errors in illustrations (at least three in figure 7-2 on page 181).

4. Code samples have errors and inconsistencies.

5. Much of the code and reference material is out of date (and was obsolete even before the print version was published).

6. The code examples are unfocused (there's too much emphasis on context) and don't always work (and didn't work online).

7. The index is often unhelpful and incomplete, without good conceptual indexing.

Mozilla programming is highly promising and, for the most part, not all that difficult once you know how, but finding accurate information about it is a tantalising process of trial and error. You have to rely on guesswork, intuition, word of mouth, limited or obsolete and inaccurate documentation, and the help of a very few (though extremely helpful) insiders available via the Mozilla newsgroups. Given that the project has been around for a few years now, I think that's unacceptable: I'd hate to see Mozilla wind up as a good technology that died for lack of decent documentation.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good reference, but lacks real teaching value., February 1, 2003

By	H. Scott Means - See all my reviews

I happened to be experimenting with XUL and Mozilla at the time that I ran across this book, so I was very eager to get into it and see if it could help clarify some of the gaping holes in the existing XUL documentation within Mozilla. As an exhaustive reference to XUL and the associated technologies that are used to build Mozilla applications, it was very successful. As a higher level tutorial that explains the relationships between the different technologies and their uses, it was not quite as successful.

Chapters 1-6 lead the reader through the progressive steps required to build and package a Mozilla-based application. The authors create a demo application called xFly which is used as a test bed to show the different features of XUL, CSS, and JavaScript. By the end of Chapter 6, this application contains a tree control, a bunch of sample menus, and various other assorted UI widgets. But it doesn't really _do_ anything. Maybe I'm too picky, but I'd rather see an application that has some function, even if all it does is play tick-tack-toe. Then, to me at lease, it's much clearer how the different pieces would fit together in a "real-world" application.

Chapters 7-12 cover more exotic and difficult aspects of Mozilla
programming such as the Extensible Binding Language (XBL), XPCOM (Mozilla's component object model), and accessing web services from XUL applications. These chapters are very dense in technical details, with good references to online resources for further study. Overall, I found this book to be a very succinct source of accurate information about building applications with Mozilla. Its only weakness seems to be that it focuses too much on low-level implementation details without giving the reader (who may be new to the idea of XML-based GUI
application programming entirely) a good high-level overview of the benefits of this type of development and which technologies serve which purpose. Chapter 1 is the only chapter that explicitly addresses high-level application architecture, and it is only 8 pages long.

The bottom line is that this is a good reference book for people who already know how and why to build applications based on Mozilla, but a not-so-good introduction and tutorial for people who are completely new to the XUL-CSS-JavaScript paradigm of application development.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Leaping Lizards! This book needs serious retooling., July 11, 2004

By	Tracy A. Mangold (Combined Locks, WI) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was always interested in creating my own apps for Mozilla. I had played around with some of the custom CSS files and peeked at the XUL files, and I wanted to learn more. I figured that buying this book would be a no-brainer because of the O'Reilly name and my good experiences with the ... Hacks series. This could of been a good book, but it seems like they were rushed to meet a publishing deadline. It starts out building a skeleton application (xFly) to explain the simpler concepts. One would expect that they would continue to flesh out the framework, and they would show how to add function to the various widgets. After Chapter 2, they abandon this idea. The examples they do provide don't work correctly. If you get the finished xFly demo program from mozdev.org, it does not work either. The site reads "This requires serious attention". I agree. This book is a good reference manual, but a poor tutorial. If you want a good tutorial on how to build Mozilla apps, try xulplanet.org instead. Co-incidentally, this entire book is available at the aforementioned site if you would like to preview this book for yourself before plunking down $40 to buy it.