Mozilla Developer Day
November 9, 2001
[Read Notes from November 9, 2001 Mozilla Developer Day for a summary of this event.]
Mozilla.org will host a developer day at the Netscape campus in Mountain View on November 9, 2001. We know this is short notice, and we know many people aren't yet ready to travel. But there is a great deal to talk about, and if we don't do this soon we'll be into the holiday season and need to wait until next year.
Brendan Eich will lead a discussion of where we're heading with Mozilla 1.0. We started this discussion at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in July, now it's time for an update. We'll also launch a Business Forum, with a focus on project management. And of course, we'll talk about the code. The session schedule is here.
Registration fees will be very low (as in $15-25) Just enough to cover pizza and perhaps a t-shirt if we're lucky. Current plans are for the morning sessions to be held in the Land Shark conference room in Building 25 and afternoon sessions in the cafeteria in Building 22.
To register, send mail to Marcia Knous.
| Time | General Session | Technical Track | Project Management Track |
| 11:00am-Noon Building 25 |
Developing Applications with XUL and JavaScript Rob Ginda Joe Hewitt | ||
| Noon-1:00pm Building 25 | XPCOM
Doug Turner |
Overview of the Mozilla Project Mitchell Baker |
|
| 1:00-2:00pm Building 25 | Networking Gagan Saksena |
Community QA Asa Dotzler |
|
| 2:00-3:00pm Building 22 | Pizza, demos and mingling | ||
| 3:00-4:00pm Building 22 | Embedding Vidur Apparao |
Business Forum Mitchell Baker |
|
| 4:00-5:00pm Building 22 |
Mozilla 1.0 Brendan Eich Gervase Markham | ||
| 5:00-6:00pm Building 22 | Overview of XBL Andrew Wooldridge | ||
State of the Mozilla Project
Mitchell Baker
This talk will provide an overview of the status of the Mozilla project, with an emphasis on using Mozilla technologies in other projects. The talk will also describe how mozilla.org interacts with developers and consumers of Mozilla technology. Topics will include Mozilla project management and milestone releases, "Bugzilla" as the answer to almost everything, determination of policy and process, and responses to commercial needs and management practices.
Developing Applications with XUL and JavaScript
Rob Ginda
Joe Hewitt
This talk will discuss the current state of XUL application development.
It will begine with an introductory overview of the Mozilla archictecture,
followed by demonstrations of the tools available to XUL developers. Tools
to be covered are the
template processor,
component viewer,
document inspector, and the
javascript debugger.
The talk will conclude with a Question and Answer period.
Mozilla 1.0
Brendan Eich
Gervase Markham
We will talk about requirements for 1.0, including stable APIs and good
memory footprint. We'll then assess how far we are from fulfilling these
requirements. In particular we will quantify recent code and data footprint
improvements, and stability figures of merit including MTBF. We'll conclude
with what remains to be fixed for 1.0, and how you can provide guidance and
help.
Embedding Mozilla
Vidur Apparao
The Mozilla web browsing engine has been designed to be embedded into
other applications. This presentation covers the core concepts involved
in embedding Mozilla, as a browsing component, into your application.
Through demonstrative C++ code samples, we will review the interfaces an
application must call and implement to embed Mozilla. General XPCOM
concepts and the services and capabilities currently provided in our
embedding interfaces will also be covered.
XPCOM: Cross-Platform Components
Doug Turner
The Cross-Platform Component Object Model (XPCOM) is a framework used in
Mozilla that lets you write software components and access them in any
XPCOM-compatible programming language (e.g. C++, JavaScript, Python).
Components are typically written and used in C++, but the mechanics of
doing so can be onerous.
This talk will cover the basics of XPCOM. We'll look at how to access existing components and the step-by-step process of writing a new component and making it available to XPCOM clients. By the end of this talk you should have enough information to write a new XPCOM component that can be used by any XPCOM client.
Mozilla Community Quality Assurance
Asa Dotzler
This talk is intended to be both presentation and discussion. The presentation
will cover the range of activities of Mozilla community quality assurance.
We'll start by reviewing the relevant tools including Bugzilla, Bonsai,
and LXR. We'll discuss how these tools are used in the primary activities
of the community including smoketesting daily builds, reporting bugs, bug
triage and the care and feeding of our bug database. We'll conclude with
discussion about the next stage of Community QA, including new activities
we might undertake, and how to organize to accomplish these.
Networking
Gagan Saksena
This talk is an overview of the networking architecture in Mozilla. The overview will provide the information needed to write a protocol handler to allow loading a URL of your scheme type. You will learn how a URL entered on the location bar turns into a network request, how the data is received, filtered through the stream converters and piped to the parser and layout.
Business Forum
Mitchell Baker
This discussion is designed for companies building Mozilla-based products. We will talk about a range of topics such as: how to become known in the Mozilla community, how to work with the mozilla.org roadmap and milestone schedule, what to do if bugs important to you are not getting attention, how to build greater control over your use of Mozilla, and how to integrate development teams with the Mozilla community. This will be an informal session, aimed at question and answer, brainstorming and discussion rather than formal presentation.
Overview of XBL
Andrew Wooldridge
This talk will give a brief introduction to XBL, it relationship to both XUL and HTML, and explain how Mozilla developers can use XBL when developing XUL applications. It should clarify any confusion over how XBL works and how it is superior in many ways to simply developing some widget or window in XUL. It will also answer questions about when is is appropriate to use XBL vs. XUL.
Scheduled Demos*
*If you're planning on attending and would like to do a demo, please
let us know.
- Patch-Maker - (Gervase Markham)
- Optimoz Gestures Plugin - (Andy Edmonds) An open source gestures implementation at http://optimoz.mozdev.org
- Classworks - (Andy Edmonds) An cross platform educational management tool with a huge library of educational hypermedia. http://www.classworks.com
- TIBET - (William Edney) a JavaScript application framework.
- Isomorphic SmartClient - (Jeff Dill) Isomorphic Software produces the Isomorphic SmartClient framework, a JavaScript web-application framework with a rich collection of DHTML widgets.