I've started experimenting with the Mozilla Toolkit (Toolkit API). Its a framework for building applications, extensions and themes for Mozilla; and it is awesome. Anyone with some basic web development skills ( xml (o,w), css, javascript) can build using the Mozilla Toolkit. They provide an nice UI markup language called XUL.
To get started I scoured the Mozilla Developer Center for documentation and tutorials and ended up spending 90% of my time with Mozilla's developer site resources. I did find 2 other tutorials and documents that helped a lot and if I can find them again I'll list them here:
Ryan's Work Blog: This post was great for a quick run down on how to set things up. I used Ryan's layout for my test app and it was REALLY useful to see how he setup his chrome.manifest with the file: reference. However, the same information can be found in the tutorial on Mozilla Developers Site by Mark Finkle...
MozDev: Getting Started with XULRunner by Mark Finkle
What I found was a nifty tool for running Mozilla Applications called XULRunner.
I started building... I had problems... I'm going to now provide some notes...
NOTES:
I am doing my development on Windows, but because of its XP (Cross Platform) design, I'll be testing and running on Windows XP 32/64, Vista Premium 32/64, FreeBSD 7.0, Fedora 8/9 and maybe Gentoo.
Windows:
1. Download XULRunner
2. Unzip and put somewhere easy: C:\xulrunner
3. Register path to xulrunner. Open cmd prompt and type: path=%PATH%;c:\xulrunner
4. Put source package in easily accessible directory. Something like c:\home\me\src\mozilla\myapp
I copied a batch file
xulgen.bat
cls
@echo off
echo About to create the XULRunner directory structure
SET def_company=mediaHACK
SET def_app=MyApp
SET def_version=0.0.0.1
SET def_build=%DATE:~10,4%%DATE:~4,2%%DATE:~7,2%
SET def_copyright=%DATE:~10,4%
SET def_app_id=xulapp@domain.tld
pause
touch application.ini
echo [App] > application.ini
SET /P cn=Enter Company Name (Default: %def_company% ):
if "%cn%"=="" SET cn=%def_company%
echo Vendor=%cn% >>application.ini
SET /P app=Enter App Name (Default: %def_app%):
if "%app%"=="" SET app=%def_app%
echo Name=%app% >>application.ini
SET /P vers=Enter Version (Default: %def_version%):
if "%vers%"=="" SET vers=%def_version%
echo Version=%vers% >> application.ini
SET /P buildid=Enter Build ID (Default: %def_build% ):
if "%buildid%"=="" SET buildid=%def_build%
echo BuildID=%buildid% >>application.ini
echo Copyright=Copyright (c) %def_copyright% >>application.ini
SET /P id=Enter App ID (Default: %def_app_id%):
if "%id%"=="" SET id=%def_app_id%
echo ID=%id% >> application.ini
echo [Gecko] >>application.ini
echo MinVersion=1.8 >>application.ini
echo MaxVersion=1.9.0.* >>application.ini
mkdir chrome
cd chrome
touch chrome.manifest
echo content %app% file:content/ > chrome.manifest
mkdir content
cd content
touch main.xul
echo ^<?xml version="1.0"?^> >main.xul
echo ^<?xml-stylesheet href="chrome://global/skin/" type="text/css"?^> >>main.xul
echo ^<window id="main" title="My App" width="300" height="300" xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"^> >> main.xul
echo ^<caption label="Hello World"/^> >> main.xul
echo ^</window^> >> main.xul
cd ../..
mkdir defaults
cd defaults
mkdir preferences
cd preferences
touch prefs.js
echo pref("toolkit.defaultChromeURI", "chrome://%app%/content/main.xul"); > prefs.js
cd ../..
This script can easily be ported to *nix and I'll post it here when I port.
After that, the files it creates need to be edited:
/application.ini => Update the ini settings to your needs
/chrome/chrome.manifest => change the myapp to the name of your folder (which i usually name based on my application)
/defaults/preferences/prefs.js (if you don't want /chrome/content/main.xul to be your default launch page)
Below I recommended you manually edit the main.xul file. The batch file now creates this Hello World example for you.
main.xul
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="chrome://global/skin/" type="text/css"?>
<window id="main" title="My App" width="300" height="300"
xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul">
<caption label="Hello World"/>
</window>
After we've edited the files and are ready to run we need to test! In windows we can do this 3 ways:
- Command Line
- Start->Run->cmd
Type: xulrunner c:\path\to\xul\app\application.ini Run - Start->Run
Type: xulrunner c:\path\to\xul\app\application.ini A batch file Create a batch file in the application directory. I found with my XP64 install I had to put the full path to XUL runner in my batch file even though i registered in the path env var. c:\xulrunner\xulrunner.exe c:\path\to\xul\app\application.ini Run your batch file.
I used the batch file method.
