You are currently viewing a snapshot of www.mozilla.org taken on April 21, 2008. Most of this content is highly out of date (some pages haven't been updated since the project began in 1998) and exists for historical purposes only. If there are any pages on this archive site that you think should be added back to www.mozilla.org, please file a bug.




status update

maintained by Chris Nelson <chrisn@statecollege.com>

Last Updated Sunday, March 7th, 1999

This status update page is updated every weekend. To get updates and news throughout the week , I invite you to check out mozillaZine, a site I maintain devoted to Mozilla advocacy.

Previous Updates

Module Updates
Javascript
March 7th
Submitted by Scott Furman <fur@netscape.com>

Scott writes:

"John Bandauer reports progress on XPConnect:

  • Non-success nsresult codes from native XPCOM methods now throw JS exceptions when JS is calling native code
  • JS exceptions map to nsresult error codes when native code is calling JS.
  • A 'Components' object hierarchy has been created in the JavaScript namespace to reflect xpcom interfaces, classes, and services into JavaScript.  The 'Component.interfaces' branch is working well enough to lazily reflect IID objects by name or by canonical numeric string form as JS objects; e.g. 'Components.interfaces.nsISupports'."
XPToolkit
March 7st
Submitted by Peter Trudelle <trudelle@netscape.com>

Highlights

  • Helped fix enough bugs to get AppRunner on its feet.
Lowlights
  • We missed the browser BM2 milestone originally planned for last week, and had to delay it until the end of next week.
  • Discovered that we had no written plans for dynamic menus.  We will be working on our plan some more starting next week to ensure that we haven't missed any other requirements, and to update the task breakdowns and estimates based on our more recent knowledge. If any groups have any dependencies on XPToolkit that aren't listed in our requirements documents posted on mozilla.org, please let us know immediately.
Accomplishments
  • Finished (hopefully) MS-Windows implementation support for dynamic menus. This was an unscheduled item from a new requirement to have dynamic menus
  • Added Mouse Wheel Tracker support for MS-Windows. This was an unscheduled item, this functionality would be required for release, and as far as I know, was not on anybody's schedule. I need to have the "view" issues reviewed by michaelp.
  • Updated  Dialog Cookbook  for use of namespaces in the examples.
  •  Updated  XUL Language Spec for namespace information and examples. Added section on XUL DOM extensions.
  • Spent a good deal more time than planned fixing numerous bugs, including various platform parity, build bustage and regression defects.
  • Solaris Workshop compilation fixes are in, we're one step closer to being able to use Purify on Unix.
  • Identified stability as a major concern for the  LinuxDev people.  Getting some decent memory and profiling tools were listed as the next objective for Unix Development. Note this isn't on anyone's schedule and everybody is having trouble buying time to work on problems like these.
  • Changed the tree widget's expand and collapse mechanism to work the correct way.
  • Fixed numerous bugs in the XUL content model.
  • Added support for "style", "id", and "class" in XUL.
  • Had a successful carpool to rename member functions that were interfering with AOLs embedding efforts (Travis Bogard asks  that we emphasize the experimental nature of their efforts).
  • Provided tests for the autoconf system to bring all the Unixes on line; switched appropriate code over to using the result of those tests, rather than hand checking for every compiler we know about.
  • Threw the switch in |nsCOMPtr| to actually make construction or assignment from raw COM interface pointers illegal.
Decisions
  • Presented our AppCores vs. Services issues to Warren with a proposed direction that would allow us to completely fold AppCores under the ServiceMgr.  Simpler is better.
Issues
  • We've got to get a new process in place that ensures that AppRunner gets stable and steadily increases in quality, while the tree remains open long enough for new development.
  • Nobody owns or has scheduled time for 'middle-ground' problems such as getting Purify working, profiling, etc., which has made stability much more difficult to achieve and will make it harder to maintain.
  • General purpose glue to mate an arbitrary native dialog with the AOM is seeming harder and harder.  Hooking any _one_ dialog up by hand is no problem.  Still trying different solutions here.
People
  • Scott Collins plans to spend some more time onsite, around the end of the month, no firm plans (or plane tickets) yet.
NGLayout
March 5th
Submitted by Troy Chevalier <troy@netscape.com>

Troy writes in with this update:

"Kipp's on hold for feature work and is full-time fixing bugs. The most notable bug fix this week was work on CSS box model calculations; we're doing a much better job now.

Chris has also put feature work on tables in hold until his bug list is under control.

I'm working in table pagination. We now repeat header and footer elements when splitting a table across pages. We're also very strict now about only allowing one header and one footer element (any additional elements are treated like ordinary body row groups), and the header and footer must become before any body row group elements. The W3C folks will be clarifying the CSS2 spec to resolve exactly how this works.

Here's some extra status from Chris that applies to GFX:

Postscript Printing is mostly complete this with the addition of forms. Added the capability to read and parse AFM files to get font metrics on Linux. We are currently getting it to work on Linux.

GFX rendered form controls can now be enabled in the viewer. The button, checkbox, radio button are usable, but not bug free."

XML
March 5th
Submitted by Nisheeth Ranjan <nisheeth@netscape.com>

Nisheeth Ranjan has this update on the status of XML in Mozilla:

"Expat, James Clark's parser (http://www.jclark.com/xml/expat.html), got plugged into Gecko this week. The parser is checked into the mozilla codebase in the directory mozilla/expat. XML well-formedness errors now get reported inside Gecko if the expat parser is enabled. Currently, the expat parser is not enabled by default. Once the remaining bugs are worked out, hopefully by early next week, we will start using expat for all XML documents.

Look out for Vidur Apparao's speech (http://www.gca.org/conf/xtech99/Thu-Talks.htm#Gecko) at the XTech' 99 conference (http://www.gca.org/conf/xtech99/xtecindx.htm) in San Jose next week. He'll be talking about XML display capabilities inside Gecko and showing some really cool demos."

Editor
March 5th
Submitted by Akkana Peck <akkana@netscape.com>

Here's Akkana's update on the status of the editor (composer):

"Some work toward implementing Get|Set|Remove Properties and SelectAll. More work on InsertBreak; looking into converting consecutive multiple breaks to a <p>.

Implemented OutputText and OutputHTML (currently in the Debug menu of viewer). This is the routine which will be called by other users of the editor, such as the mail/news compose window.

Work on selection iterators, which should clean up DeleteSelection and fix some of the selection-related bugs. This is still in progress; if deletion gets worse in the next few days, please bear with us because it will improve in the long run. Started work on getting Paste working.

Clarified the structure of nsI*Editor interfaces, and implemented the new structure; see the newsgroup (netscape.public.mozilla.editor) for discussion. Some work on defining the Rules system.

Mail/News
March 5th
Submitted by Phil Peterson <phil@netscape.com>

Phil Peterson has news regarding the Mail/News client:

"This week

  • Added directory /mozilla/mailnews/ to the Tinderbox builds on Win32 and Linux, thanks to sar.
  • To see what we have so far (which isn't much), run the command line apprunner -url resource:/res/samples/mailshell.xul from the dist/bin directory.
  • Parsing local mail folders works.
  • Displaying local mail messages works
  • Displaying the list of local messages in the thread pane works (using fake data so far)
  • Some work on Reply and Forward commands.
  • Planned integration of mail/news with new security code (which of course is not available to mozilla).
  • Plugged new netlib stream converters from ebina into libmime.
  • XUL files written for main 3 pane window, including menus and toolbars.
  • Worked with XPApps and netlib group on a plan for modal, blocking password dialogs in the absence of Gecko reentrancy.
  • Unified component manager and service manager.
  • Some work on reading prefs, esp. for local mail path.
Next week
  • Planning to have some demonstrable mail functionality by 3/12
  • Need to plan milestones for post-3/12 releases, including IMAP, LDAP, prefs, filtering, and other features.
  • Hopefully the MORK database will be up; we're counting on it for the 3/12 milestone to display real data in the thread pane.
  • Need to pass commands from XUL down through RDF to the mail/news data sources.
  • Need to resolve issues surrounding view-specific information needed to dispatch commands (analogous to MSG_Pane from 4.x)
  • Need to find out how to re-root the thread pane and message pane based on click handlers in the folder pane and thread pane, respectively"

Previous Updates