September 2002
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
11h 38m
English
book
Creating Applications with Mozilla
by David Boswell, Brian King, Ian Oeschger, Pete Collins, Eric Murphy
Content preview from Creating Applications with Mozilla
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 1. Mozilla as Platform
The Mozilla project was started in March 1998 with the goal of developing the successor to Netscape's Communicator 4.x browser suite. Today Mozilla is used by developers as a platform for creating applications that can be installed locally or run remotely over the Internet.
The difference between the Mozilla project's original goal of creating a browser suite and its current use as a cross-platform development framework is not as strange as it may sound at first. A web browser might not seem like an application development framework, but it is. Browsers allow people using any type of computer to access applications such as Yahoo! Mail to send and receive email, Amazon's book ordering service, or eBay's online auction house.
Mozilla has expanded the idea of using a browser to access applications by building on some of the technologies that are used to create web sites, such as CSS and JavaScript. A comparison of web technologies to Mozilla technologies is presented in this chapter and is helpful in explaining how the Mozilla project has turned into a platform for creating cross-platform applications.
1.1. Visualizing Mozilla's Front End
In the beginning, there were 3 front ends: Mac, Windows and Unix. Each took a suite of developers to maintain. Adding a new feature (even just a button) required 3 engineers to waste at least a day (more often a week) slaving away until the feature was complete. This had to change.
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.