Creating Applications with Mozilla

Creating Applications with Mozilla
David Boswell,Brian King,Ian Oeschger,Pete Collins,Eric Murphy | 1900-01-01 00:00:00 | O'Reilly Media | 480 | Internet
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.
Reviews
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.
Reviews
This was the first Mozilla XUL book that I read; I now have Nigel McFarlane's book as well. I find it useful to have more than one reference book as I can often find things in one that are not in the other.

I found this book quick and easy to read and a good introduction whilst also going into sufficent detail.

Importantly for me it contains information on how to go about creating a remote application to run over the Internet and using serverside PHP, neither of which have I seen mentioned elsewhere.

The book is not perfect but it is useful and I think some of the other reviewers have been unduly harsh; I am glad that I was not put off.
Reviews
I only just got the book, but the people who complained that it doesn't stand up to the usually high O'Reilly standards are spot on. The second chapter, which is all about "getting started" ought to explain basic concepts clearly. Instead it throws out all kinds of mumbo jumbo and forward references like "You could also define this style rule in an external stylesheet and make that stylesheet part of the package for your application, as we do later in this chapter ...." Why? Why should I keep reading to find out? Why does the first chapter of real content (chapter one understandably explains more background on mozilla and XPFE) seem to have a forward reference every third paragraph?

Clearly, the authors did not sit down and make a coherent plan of what the best way to introduce each topic to the neophyte. This stands in stark contrast to the various O'Reilly Perl books that always seem to give the overview in clear terms and then flesh it out, instead of diving into the middle and trying to explain it as you go.

The only reason right now to get this book is because it appears to be the only (or one of the only) ones on the topic at this time. Hopefully _Rapid Application Development with Mozilla_ due out in November this year will get it right.
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.
Reviews
This book gives a solid grounding in the principles involved and acts as a primer to the nitty gritty of producing a XUL application. In practice, XUL is pretty easy but it's easy to be caught unawares which is where a book like this comes in. If you've ever wondered how to extend Mozilla with a new button, or why your chrome doesn't work, or why Mozilla ignores it, or how to write a new chrome application then this is the book for you. Learn the principles of XUL and things fall into place very easily.

I am puzzled that other reviewers claim XUL and Mozilla are not ready for mainstream since the fact that an entire browser, mail, chat, editor, JS debugger and hundreds more third party extensions and apps have been written using it demonstrates it is. It certainly needs tools and add robustness, but it is already a viable and strong technology for producing platform neutral applications.

It is well worth the money, however it should be revised to reflect the latest Mozilla developments. As an added bonus, the source for this book is actually online so you can evaluate it yourself at books.mozdev.org before buying it.

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