subject: Xul Development And Its Use In Mozilla/ Firefox Extensions [print this page] Being an XML user-interface language and loaded with excellent features, XUL is widely preferred to develop browser extension. This language was created to facilitate fast and simple development of the Mozilla browser extension. But, with the launch of Firefox, XUL was fully explored and came into public gaze. The Nvu HTML editor, thunderbird e-mail reader, and the Sunbird calendar are all written in XUL.
The major strength of any open source software are extensions. Whenever a user notices a need, creates an extension and uploads it to the relevant extension site. This whole process does not require any hard core programming skills. Just familiarity with XML and JavaScript is all that's needed.
XUL is widely used to write the cross platform applications such as Mozilla Firefox. On these cross platforms, it is interpreted by the layout engine known as Gecko, which rendors firefox's user interface and web page display.
XUL relies mostly on multiple web standards and web technologies, including CSS, JavaScript and DOM. This reason makes XUL relatively easy to learn for individuals with background of web programming and design. Mozilla provides experimental XUL runner builds to let developers build their applications on top of the Mozilla application framework and of XUL in particular. Further, XUL provides a portable definition for common widgets, allowing them to move easily to any platform on which mozilla applications run.
Themes usually referred as skins prominently define the look and feel of Mozilla products. Moreover, as the third parties use XUL to create extensions, so they can use it to create new themes. Using these themes, the library can easily provide a browser that was customized for local user requirements. The browser could be preloaded with bookmarks for useful information sources. Apart from this, icons can be added to provide access to functions for users with special accessibility requirements.
One of the major strengths of XUL development is that, it is build on the skills of web developer or XUL designer, which they already possesses such XML, Javascript JDF and CSS. Besides, XUL language itself is quite easy compare to Java and Visual C++ and much more powerful than DHTML (Dynamic HTML).
Overall, for mozilla/firefox extension development, XUL is the best language which every developer can use.
