Creating Applications with Mozilla (Paperback)

by David Boswell (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
David has been involved in the Mozilla community for more than three years. He started the Mozilla development effort at Alphanumerica and set up the first two Mozilla Developer Meetings. At Alphanumerica David worked with Pete Collins on a number of Mozilla application including Aphrodite, Total Recall, and Chameleon. Pete and David also founded mozdev.org, a site offering free hosting for Mozilla applications. There are currently over 70 development projects hosted on the site. David has also written a number of articles about Mozilla including 'Getting Your Work Into Mozilla' and a series of articles discussing how to use Mozilla technologies to create a Pacman-like video game.

Brian has been hacking on Mozilla and related projects since early 1999. It began with a European funded project called Fabula to create software for children with the aim of learning minority languages like Basque, Catalan, Frisian, Irish, Welsh. This was built using Mozilla. Interest bloomed and he started contributing to the Mozilla Editor, and exploring the rest of the vast body of code. He moved on to work at ActiveState where he was heavily involved in the Komodo project, a scripting language IDE that uses the Mozilla application framework. Previously, Brian spent his time as a C++ applications developer, interspersed with some Perl development and XML consultancy. His technical interests include observing and participating in the re-shaping of the web environment brought about by XML. Other languages he dabbles in are PHP, Python, and JavaScript. Brian is now working as a Web technologies consultant.

Ian Oeschger is Senior Principal Writer at Netscape Communications, where mozilla.org was started over three years ago. His abiding interest in language is the basis for some of his more recent infatuations with Python, XML, web application development, and linguistics. He maintains a number of the XPFE documents on mozilla.org, including the XUL and DOM References. Ian published several articles about XML and mozilla application development for O'Reilly, and also wrote the themes documentation for Netscape, the XPInstall API Reference, and others. Before getting involved with Mozilla and Netscape, he worked at Oceania, a startup doing XML-based electronic medical records and charting software.

Pete got involved with the Mozilla project in April 1999 as a contributor to the editor module. He was also the first external developer to start documenting xul. His initial efforts were a remote, web enabled script editor and a community driven rewrite of the existing Mozilla UI. The project was later named Aphrodite. In January 2000, he joined with David Boswell and the Alphanumerica team. Together they evangelized Mozilla as a viable application platform through the many projects they created and Mozilla developer meetings they organized. Currently a software engineer employed by WorldGate, Pete is working on customizing Mozilla for their TV Internet Client Software. He is the co-founder of mozdev.org a site dedicated to Mozilla based projects. He is a regular Mozilla comitter and owner of various Mozdev projects including jslib and Chameleon.

Eric has been doing Mozilla development since Spring 2000, starting off with an instant-messenger client called Jabberzilla. He enjoys exploring opportunities of Jabber and Mozilla working together with new implementations, such as a collaborative whiteboard and real-time web content demonstrations. In 2002, Eric is looking forward to joining the workforce with a recent computer science degree from the University of Northern Iowa. Working on Mozilla projects has been a great resume-builder for him, and will always be an important part of his life to reflect on.

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 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: #644,186 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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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.