blog.mozbox.org - shared

XUL dark matter on MDC

Paul Rouget — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:56:00 +0100

Delphine, our intern, has migrated the map of the mozpad universe to MDC :

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL_dark_matter.

If you work on any Mozilla based project, feel free to add it.

My first day...

Paul Rouget — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:24:00 +0100

... as a Mozilla employee.

Let me tell you a little bit about me :

My name is Paul Rouget. I'm French, I live in Paris, and I'm a Mozilla addict.

Five years ago, during my first internship, my boss asked me to find a way to build a kiosk browser. It was my first experience with Firefox and XUL. It was the beginning of a love story between Mozilla technologies and me.

During the next year, Laurent Jouanneau started building a wiki page about such technologies. What a good opportunity for me to get involved in the community. We have created a portal named xulfr.org including some French translations from xulplanet. The release of Firefox 1.0 was the beginning of a big adventure. More Firefox became famous and more Xulfr activity grew.

During these last years, as a contributor, I've organized some Mozilla related events, talked a lot about XUL and "modern" Web technologies, I've helped companies, worked with schools. In other words, I was becoming a Tech Evangelist.

Last week, during my birthday party, Mozilla announced to me that I was now officially a Tech Evangelist at Mozilla. Trust me, it was a really really good night ;)

This new job will not change a lot my "daily" life. I know Mozilla. I know most of the Mozilla Europe people. Some of them are close friends. I have my own desk in the Paris office. But I will be able to give 100% of my time to the Mozilla project and work throughout European countries ! That sounds like a revolution to me !

/me is really glad !

A very good day ... and some

Paul Rouget — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 15:18:00 +0200

We (French Mozilla team) are in Lyon (south of France) for a libre sofware meeting.

Tristan has made a really good talk about the future of Mozilla (labs and Firefox 3.1 b1). What a good opportunity for me to show what we're able to do with the new Mozilla engine.

Have fun : play with the <video/> element, and add some cool SVG and CSS effects :

http://www.mozbox.org/jdll/video.xh... (FF 3.1b1 required).

BTW, this week is the birthday of 5 of us. Today, it's mine. October is a really good month ^^

MAOW ... so many people !

Paul Rouget — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 16:56:00 +0200

We are about 110 guys (and some girls) ! Awesome !

Tshirt MAOW

Paul Rouget — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:29:00 +0200

Suivre le / Following the Mozilla Addons Workshop

Paul Rouget — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:57:00 +0200

Twitter : http://twitter.com/MAOW08
Flickr : http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/MAOW08
IRC : irc://irc.mozilla.org#maow

Utilisez "@MAOW08" pour faire suivre votre post twitter sur le compte MAOW08.
Use "@MAOW08" in order to forward your twitter posts to the MAOW08 account.

Utilisez le tag MAOW08 pour poster vos photos.
Tag your flickr uploads with MAOW08.

Rejoignez nous sur le canal IRC #maow.
Join us on the #maow irc channel.

Les conférences seront filmées.
All talks and presentations will be filmed.

Mozilla Add-ons Workshop : Updated schedule

Paul Rouget — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:43:00 +0200

150 people have subscribed to the MAOW, we had to close registrations since we can't fit more than 100 people at the conference venue. Exciting :)

The new schedule (french version) :

Brian King keynote

Your first extension (Paul Rouget)
Your first XulRunner application (Paul Rouget)

Mozilla Build System (Laurent Jouanneau)
How to create a C++ XPCom from a C/C++ library (Florian Quèze, Instantbird guy)

Javascript for grown-ups (JS 1.7/1.8, closure, jsm, ...) (Olivier Gambier)
XulBooster (Frédéric Legens, main developer)

Adblock plus: revisiting a successful extension (Wladimir Palant)

XPCom for dummies (David Marteau)
FUEL (Laurent Jouanneau)
Extension and security (David Teller)
Automated testing (mochitest, xpcshell test, ...) (Arnaud Renevier)

Your first Ubiquity command (Paul Rouget)

In 10 days, french people will be Mozilla ninjas ;)

Mozilla Add-ons Workshop in Paris, it's alive !

Paul Rouget — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:30:00 +0200

French version here.

I'm glad to announce that the Mozilla Add-ons Workshop in Paris is now open for subscriptions ! It will take place on Saturday September 20th. William talked a bit about this event. Our objective is to bring together French-speaking XUL developers, hackers, Web developers... to discuss about Mozilla technologies.

For more information about the MAOW, see here (in French):

http://wiki.mozilla.org/MAOW.

For logistics, we need to know approximately how many people will attend, and which talks will bring a big attendance. So we ask people to register here (in French):

http://workshop.xulfr.org

Thanks Mozilla Europe interns for this little PHP tool :)

Talks and workshops:

Your first extension
Your first XulRunner application
Javascript for grown-ups (JS 1.7/1.8, closure, jsm, ...)
FUEL
Mozilla build system (how to manage your XulRunner app and extension with it)
How to bind a C/C++ library in Mozilla (XPCom)
How to contribute to Mozilla
... and some Lightning talks

If you're looking for more information, feel free to send me an email: paul dot rouget at gmail dot com.

Open Mashups Studio

Paul Rouget — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:13:00 +0200

A new entry to the Mozpad Universe: Open Mashups Studio.

From open-mashups.org :

Open Mashups is a unique solution that empower any creative user to design, run and share its own applications. These applications are built by assembling components.

Take a look at the screencast ! It's awesome (notice the SVG related work) !

Open-Mashups is a Firefox extension based on technologies such as SVG, XBL, XSLT and XPCom. The author of the extension (Fabrice Desré, from Orange Labs - France Telecom) told me a future version of this tool will be based on XulRunner in order to provide a cross platform Desktop widget engine :)

Try it ! (Firefox 3 required)

Mozpad & XulRunner logos

Paul Rouget — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 16:12:00 +0100

Hi folks !

A generous artist, Marianne Thoyer, has made some work about the Mozpad identity. She works on some Mozpad logo attempts. Here some drafts:

And my favorite one:

After seeing these pictures, I thought the 'cell' ones could fit for a XulRunner logo, so, just for fun, I've asked her to change the label mozpad to xulrunner:

Before going forward, she needs to know the community feeling. Feel free to comment :)

JStify: Safety of extensions

Paul Rouget — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:10:00 +0200

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.

XUL activity in France

Paul Rouget — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 16:50:00 +0200

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.

"Programming Firefox" O'Reilly

Paul Rouget — Mon, 28 May 2007 02:32:00 +0200

is in my hands:

No hot stuffs (XPCom, np*, Gecko 1.9), but looks really interesting.

rendez-vous

Paul Rouget — Wed, 16 May 2007 15:28:00 +0200

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.

Vim as a XUL Widget

Paul Rouget — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:16:00 +0200

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.

Developer Day in Paris - Codeeditor public demo

Paul Rouget — Thu, 10 May 2007 13:03:00 +0200

Really exciting news: The third Mozilla Developer Day of this year will be organized on June 23 in Paris :)

I would like to use this meeting as an opportunity to make the first public live demo of Codeeditor.

Audio SVG widget in a Xul app

Paul Rouget — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:43:00 +0200

I've wrote for the Scenari Project (one of the greatest XulRunner based project in France) a SVG based audio widget.

Video:

Powerful :)

The XPCom component reading the wav file has been written by David (from libsndfile and portaudio).

Chrome view

Paul Rouget — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 02:03:00 +0200

This week-end, I've made some work from the Verbosio manifest parser (thanks Alex).