David Teller (a Xulfr member) is a researcher in the field of interaction between programming languages and security. A few days ago, he wrote an interesting post about the safety of extensions and put forward the outline of an analysis toolbox for the Javascript language. Feel free to comment.
shared
Saturday 8 September 2007
XUL activity in France
By Paul Rouget on Saturday 8 September 2007, 16:50
Xulfr team is a privileged observer of the use of the Mozilla platform in France. Most of us work professionally with Mozilla technologies. I thought it might be a good idea to write a little report about what has happened in France over the last few years as far as XUL is concerned.
A few words about Xulfr
3 years ago, Laurent Jouanneau (from Disruptive Innovations, Daniel Glazman's colleague) created a web site dedicated to Mozilla technologies: xulfr.org. One year later, I joined him. In the beginning, it was a wiki website, then the Xulplanet tutorial translation was added, followed by a discussion board (over 800 members at present) with a jobs section, a mailing list, a snippets collection, a planet to aggregate Mozilla-related blogs in French, ... Today, we get about 250,000 page views monthly (the traffic has doubled since 2005). We organize company interviews, a lot of public speeches (at least 6 per year) and "Xul Parties". Since January 2007, we are officially a registered non-profit organization.
My own experience
I've been working as a Mozilla freelance developer since 2005. I worked with several companies on XUL/XpCom based projects. I met many people and companies interested in Mozilla technologies.In the beginning, we saw a considerable demand for extension development and Firefox customizations. Many people were asking me for training courses and participation in Firefox-related XUL & JS projects. XUL was essentially known as a language for developing Firefox/Thunderbird addons.
As time passed, the documentation improved (thanks MDC!), and the quality of developed addons increased. Writing an extension became easier. XulRunner became more and more known. As a result, companies got interested in XUL desktop applications development and looked for help about XulRunner.
Today, XUL is a well-known language and XulRunner is known as a decent piece of software. There is a lot of documentation available and many people develop their own addons and desktop applications. Developers are relatively independent. When I meet companies, it is essentially for sharing my knowledge and for advanced projects that make use of C++ XPCom components and plugins.
As you can see, the interest in XUL as a language has been ignited by Firefox extensions development. And as developers learned XUL, they also became more aware of the Mozilla platform as a whole, and its use in desktop application development.
Sharing our experience
French people love Mozilla technologies, and so we meet often. Xulfr organized Xulfr parties, as well as talks about Mozilla technologies at every French Open Source related meetings (France, Switzerland). Among many other, a few well-known example include:
- Libre software meeting 2006: Five independent speeches about Mozilla framework and XUL based products;
- Solutions Linux 2007: We invited 8 companies to talk with us about Mozilla Framework. The meeting hosted about 200 people and lasted for 4 hours.
More and more people ask me to give training courses and dedicated magazines ask me (and others) to write articles about XUL development in practice. Except from that, I work with two schools giving XUL&co lessons.
XUL dark matter ... a few highlights
A significant part of XUL projects are developed inhouse. Other projects are mainly carried out by Disruptive Innovations (Daniel Glazman and Laurent Jouanneau), and by me. But there are more and more developers who become proficient with Mozilla technologies. We can observe their activity through the Xulfr community (IRC, forums, meetings).
So, many companies use Mozilla technologies, and the examples include:
- Renault F1 - A famous race car manufacturer (intranet back-end): Firefox extension, XBL, XUL, chrome, xpcom;
- LeMonde.fr - One of the main newspaper websites (back-end software: Le Sept): Firefox, XBL, XUL, chrome, xpcom;
- IdealX - OpenSource service company (Subscription management for one of the main political parties: IDXAsso): remote XUL, XBL;
- Linbox - OpenSource service company (Kiosk browser): Firefox, XBL, XUL, C++, chrome, xpcom;
- OpenWengo - VOIP software extension: Firefox extension, XBL, XUL, C++, chrome, xpcom;
- 3liz - OpenSource service company (Map editor): XulRunner & Firefox, XBL, XUL, C++, SVG, chrome, xpcom;
- Zoomorama - (authoring tools): XulRunner, XBL, XUL, C++, plugin, SVG, chrome, xpcom;
- IRCAM - Music research institute (audio segmentation software): XulRunner, XBL, XUL, SVG, C++ chrome, xpcom;
- Yoono - (Sharing bookmarks experience): Firefox extension, XBL, XUL, chrome, xpcom;
- Nextweb - (NextCMS, a rich CMS): Firefox extension, XBL, XUL, chrome, xpcom;
- Courtanet - (underwriter software); Firefox & XulRunner, XBL, XUL, chrome;
- Scenari-Platform: mainly developed by Kelis - a computer-aided publishing chains, used by severals companies (Private assurance agency, book editor, etc.) and public agencies (Universities, SNCF - French National Railways Company, INA - national library of television archives, etc): XulRunner, XUL, C++, chrome, patches, xpcom;
- Gendarmerie (police army force): La Gendarmerie is a big administration. They have about 105,000 Firefox and Thunderbird users. They make impressive work in order to adapt the Mozilla software to their network infrastructure (through addons and remote XUL pages) and to the security obligations (protocol extensions): Firefox, XBL, XUL, C++, chrome, xpcom, patch;
- NeufTelecom - Second French ISP (Firefox customizations and addons for a Linux embedded system, see http://easyneuf.org): PyXPCom, XBL, XUL, chrome;
- Gestranet - IS management: remote XUL, XBL;
- LinterWeb - Wikipedia on CD: XulRunner;
- ... and more.
There are also many non-commercial projects. Many discussions led in the XulFr forums are about these home developed projects (such as on-line games addons for example).
As you can see, French companies are XUL-hungry. I think a dedicated localized website helps a lot, likewise, the presence of a company such as Disruptive Innovations, specialized in Mozilla technologies, has been a great asset.
Moreover, we are lucky to have in France a vibrant Mozilla community and ecosystem. Let me just mention the Geckozone portal as one of the most prominent examples. No to forget many French books (not translations) that have been published on Mozilla software and XUL.
What about other European countries? I know there's AllPeers in Prague, Joost and TomTom in Netherlands. I know a project in Germany, IDA, an e-learning authoring tool. I would love to know more about XUL activities in Europe. If you know any other European Mozilla technologies related project, please let me know!
-- thanks Stanisław Małolepszy for helping me with writing this post.
Monday 28 May 2007
"Programming Firefox" O'Reilly
By Paul Rouget on Monday 28 May 2007, 02:32
is in my hands:
No hot stuffs (XPCom, np*, Gecko 1.9), but looks really interesting.
Wednesday 16 May 2007
rendez-vous
By Paul Rouget on Wednesday 16 May 2007, 15:28
My next Mozilla related talks and presentations:
- linuxdays, Geneva: May 22 - link
- Firefox 3
- Mozilla application framework
- journée du logiciel libre (gullUTC): May 31 - link
- The Mozilla project & Mozilla as a framework
- Mozilla devDay: June 23 - link
- Codeeditor demo
- Libre Software Meeting: July 11 - link
- Mozilla as a development platform: XUL and Gecko, the Firefox underground
And I will probably take part in the Chaos Communication Camp 2007 - link.
Thursday 10 May 2007
Vim as a XUL Widget
By Paul Rouget on Thursday 10 May 2007, 17:16
It's not my first experience about embedding Vim as a XML widget in Gecko, but I've just made some new stuff around the plugin. Now, It works like Scintilla, and I hope to be able to implement the same interface (IDLs) as Scintilla, but it sounds really difficult.
« previous entries - page 3 of 4 - next entries »