Report From The Mozilla Developer Meeting 139
About 50 people packed into the Sputnik conference room at Netscape yesterday. Around 12:30 Mike Shaver and Alphanumerica's David Boswell kicked off the meeting. "Hopefully, this'll be the first in a series," Boswell announced. "Annually is ridiculous," he told me later. "I'd like to see it happen every three or four months ..." The two sounded the theme that Mozilla development was happening -- whether people were aware of it or not.
At one point, Dave Sim from the O'Reilly Network said "I've learned more in the last hour and a half than I have in the last two years." Mike said that was the problem: their story that wasn't getting out. "What is the story?" Sim countered. "What is the big picture?" Shaver said the real problem is there are lots of stories. Yes, there's users that want to use Mozilla as a full-blown application -- but there's also people who want to develop applications for the Mozilla platform, with others focussing on interoperability. "The platform story is one of the best things about what Mozilla does."
Alphanumerica's David Boswell agrees. "We see Mozilla as an application virtual machine that will allow us to write applications." Because the application can run on any system with a Mozilla browser, developers reach systems running Windows, the Mac OS, Linux, OS/2, and even Amiga and BeOs systems or set-top boxes. Pete Collins pointed out later that "Mozilla is 95% cross-platform code." He described the Mozilla platform as "write-once, run-anywhere -- done correctly."
That could be a huge draw. Earlier in the meeting someone suggested a "People who are doing stuff with Mozilla" page. "We had one long ago," Mike Shaver joked. "It listed NeoPlanet." But now, according to Pete Collins, there's been a spreading interest in Mozilla. "Since November, December, it's really starting to pick up momentum ... Alot of validations are happening because things are being done externally." Cameron Price had flown down from Real Networks in Seattle to attend the conference. Identifying himself as "just a grunt software developer," he pointed out what everyone was saying: it's not just a browser, it's a set of tools. During the group discussion, one developer even said "I'd like to see Mozilla come out and not have any browser with it."
A quick survey of the room revealed some impressive projects. Aaron Leventhal, who flew in from Wisconsin, is working on wearable computing and voice-browsing for the blind. A generalized user interface would allow seamless transitions between devices with Mozilla. Another developer wants to make his own R&D distribution of Linux using Mozilla's XML parser. ("Everyone writes specialty XML parsers," Cameron Price told me later.) By the end of the day the developer said he'd gotten answers to his Linux implementation questions. But more importantly, he'd gotten a sense of where the other developers were going. "The scope of what people have planned is mind-boggling. I feel so much smaller."
Mitchell Baker, who identified herself as Mozilla's "chief lizard wrangler," said that as a result of the meeting, "We learned how many people are writing applications using Mozilla." Pete Collins said the turn-out was a positive sign -- "Overall, just a good vibe" -- and so did David Boswell. ("Very validating. A room full of 80 external developers ...") "I don't think we're gonna have a really simple platform in the year 2000," Mike Shaver warned the audience. But the release of a preview version of Netscape 6 had already generated some interesting issues for the group discussion.
The first question in the developer group discussion came from Asa Dotzler, an independent QA tester from Austin, Texas. ("I test the tip," Dotzler said at Thursday's Mozilla party.) He asked a deceptively simple question about how they're defining "skin" and "package," and Dave Hyatt conceded the definitions they were using internally clash with public definitions. The problem is that what people think of as "skins" are more like Mozilla applications or packages -- and that needs to be clear, for security reasons. (A generalized system for ensuring security was suggested -- maybe giving skins directory-specific access. Someone cited the way this is handled in Java 1.2, and Mike Shaver said "maybe that's a model we can copy" if necessary.)
The group discussion continued for nearly two hours, and the other big issue was bug reporting. Dotzler gave an exaggerated example of an off-target bug report: "This Net2Phone button on my toolbar isn't working." What do you do with reports of non-Mozilla bugs? "You shouldn't even take bug reports on alternate skins," one developer suggested. Or should you? ("That's a slippery slope. Let's see how big a problem it is ...") Shaver said it doesn't seem unreasonable that people are going to want to report bugs about Aphrodite. "It may not be our fault, but it may be our problem ... We can create a tag for that easily. I think that's the way to do that and not panic too much."
The bigger concern is how the handling of non-Mozilla bugs will scale.
"As long as the bug database holds up."
"It should be the author's responsibility."
Someone even suggested they "take a lesson from Slashdot and have some volunteers for triaging." Everyone began talking at once. "Now we're going," Mike joked.
He started by saying "I don't think we want to follow the Linux kernel module of bug tracking." He seemed to be leaning towards the rule of thumb that "If it's in the source tree, it should probably be on Bugzilla," and later suggested that maybe "Anything that goes into the tree should have a module owner and a QA contact." Across the room, someone pointed out the implicit vindication in worries over having too many bug reports. "I think this is a marvelous problem to have. I look forward to having this problem. This means we're successful."
After the group discussion, the developers broke up into three smaller, intense groups discussing skins, bugs, and applications. Mozilla developers are already working on skin-switching for beta 1. (Several skins could be active at once -- for the browser, the newsreader ...) Alphanumerica's Cameron Barrett, leading the skin group, talked about how he built the Sullivan skin, with some help from Pete and David building on Aphrodite (which started out as an open source skin). He said he started making the Sullivan skin in early March -- with no Mozilla experience at all. After a week to get up to speed, he completed the design in a week (mostly by doing mock-ups in Photoshop), with another week and a half for coding. Total development time: four weeks. He talked about the challenges of designing a GUI for different platforms. (Predictibly, there's lots of issues with the Mac OS. "You could emulate your own windows in the Mac, but it wouldn't be very Mac-like. You have to give them a software that's going to behave the way they expect ...")
Barrett predicts hundreds if not thousands of skins once the skin-switching is incorporated into Mozilla. But after the talk, he said skins also serve an educational function. "Our main message was to get people to understand that it's so extensible." So what happens now? "I think people are gonna experiment."
At the applications meeting participants discussed packaging and install questions, API issues, sound, and Unix plug-ins with Mike Shaver. Someone asked about installing Mozilla on Unix networks and maybe even in Linux distributions, and another developer suggested making an easy-to-digest package out of Javascript. And yes, they're still recruiting people for Mozilla hacking. (Mike Shaver joked that "If all the people who were at the party last night had spent those three hours fixing bugs ...")
The problem with developing applications for Mozilla is that Mozilla is a moving target -- the platform is evolving while people are developing. One developer suggested the solution might be writing apps for a specific build -- M14, say -- and then upgrading as necessary. (And there was some discussion about the term "beta" vs. "stable branch points" or "snapshots in time with a name" ...)
Later R. Saravanan showed the applications group XMLterm -- an Xterm-like interface written using the Mozilla component libraries. On a Dell laptop, the interface was running Emacs -- including cursors -- and even Towers of Hanoi. ("A new regression test," someone joked after a few moments of stunned silence.) Saravanan said it took him 10 months, working part time ("It's not my job!") -- and that it had never crashed.
Mitchell Baker was part of the bug group, and says they discussed "the question of building community and educating people on how to produce better-quality bug [reports]."
The other impressive application was a remote script editor -- and Alphanumerica's next project is crash-recovery functionality -- saving state information on browser windows.
Boswell said the turnout was higher than he expected, and was already planning the next developer meeting. "It would make sense to have the next one in New York. Or at least not in San Francisco ..." Meanwhile, O'Reilly's Open Source conference in July will also have a Mozilla track.
Note: Readers interested in grabbing some Mozilla and Netscape 6 compatible skins should see the choices on offer at alphanumerica and mozillazine.
aphanumerica rocks (Score:1)
Clothes? (Score:1)
The Difference between Mozilla and Netscape? (Score:2)
LIZARD, not Wizard! (Score:3)
It's "chief LIZARD wrangler", come on, even I know that. Project Gecko, Mozilla's a big lizard -- come on, why would she be wrangling wizards? Their pelts aren't even good for much of anything....
Just think what Perl could do... (Score:5)
Unfortunately, Javascript may not be the ideal language for writing these cross-platform applications. The thought that's floating around in my mind right now is adding Perl to the mix. It's already impressively cross-platform, and an extremely powerful programming language. Just imagine what you could do with Mozilla's platform coupled with an embedded Perl interpreter and Perl language bindings (e.g. for XUL) as good as (or better than) Javascript's bindings...
I'm confused. (Score:2)
Re:The Difference between Mozilla and Netscape? (Score:4)
Things I Wanna Do... (Score:5)
2) Chop out Email, News. I want a web browser. I already have an MUA and a newsreader.
3) Single-menubar-button toggling of Java/Javascript, and image-autoloading. I usually want 'em all off all the time. Sometimes I have to turn 'em on, and I don't want it buried under three levels of menus like in Nutscrape 4.xx.
Too ambitious? (Score:4)
I admit that I haven't been following the Mozilla story as closely I as I probably should be over the last few months, but now I see the reason that there isn't a fully functional browser release. Since when has the Mozilla project been about a platform? It sounds like Mozilla is trying to be all things to all people, instead of just concentrating on one thing, and doing it well. While I appreciate that a platform is of more use overall than a single application, there are some of us that have been waiting patiently for the browser that Mozilla promised for a long time.
It sounds like the project has become a little too ambitious too quickly. I would love to see all these various projects come to fruition, but it sounds like all the projects are being delayed up by all the others.
This is probably too simplistic a view, of course; I don't mean this as flamebait, and I'm sure I will be corrected. Am I the only one who is frustrated from two years of waiting for Mozilla?
darren
Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
Re:The Difference between Mozilla and Netscape? (Score:2)
Sort of like a free d/l of Red Hat vs. paying $100 for Red Hat + MetroX & other proprietary stuff, only Netscape is free.
Re:The Difference between Mozilla and Netscape? (Score:2)
What I got from the article was that Mozilla is going to contain programming hooks and tons of modules and skins, of which Navigator 6 will be using the browser component. Mozilla will be much more than just the browser, and Navigator 6 won't.
darren
Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:1)
Mozillation RDF inference/logic support in Mozilla (Score:2)
Another non-Netscape Mozilla development... this is looking into the use of W3C RDF [w3.org] for logic/inference applications (eg. client-side decision support tools). See the Mozilla Enabling Inference [mozilla.org] pages for details, and Geoff Chappell's [w3.org] Mozillation announcement on the RDF Interest Group [w3.org].
DARPA's RDF-related Agent language [zdnet.com] might also be of interest to /. conspiracy theorists... ;-)
-- danbriRe:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:3)
I agree -- JavaScript is a broken language that really only makes sense in the context of a web page; using it for scripting of anything else is really pushing it. I've always thought that Microsoft's use of JavaScript in the Windows Scripting Host was pretty dumb (it's not a system scripting language, people! It's just not!) However, embedding Perl into Mozilla would add 1 Mb to the size of the runtime... is that what we want? Although it does sounds like a groovy idea. There would be no limit to what you could make Mozilla do.
Does/will Mozilla allow for things such as an embedded interpreter be loaded dynamically, or will it always load everything on startup?
darren
Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
PerlScript is server-side... (Score:2)
Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:2)
... but you need a plug in for it, and as far ass I know, only works in IE.
darren
Ooops -- the extra 's' in 'as' was an accident, but I leave it there just in case this statement is wrong! ;)
Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
Re:The Difference between Mozilla and Netscape? (Score:4)
Imagine if Mandrake suddenly decided to stop using RedHat. Suddenly they would need to do all the work RedHat had been doing for them. Why duplicate effort?
Bad Mojo
Why Perl? (Score:2)
Now this isn't meant as flamebait, but why Perl? I appreciate it's cross-platform, and great for some tasks, but I'm sorry, Perl isn't number one for writing object orientated applications in. Let's face it, Perl sucks as an OO language, with it's packages and it's "bless" function. Perl is simply an "enhanced" version of awk, and it shows.
People who write web pages for a living aren't going to want to write in Perl. JavaScript may not be the most powerful tool in the Universe, but at least it has a syntax which most people can get used to, even if they're not bearded hippy Linux gurus. Asking them to write stuff in Perl of all things is just plain stupid.
For a far superior alternative to Perl, see here [python.org]./P.
thanks, kramer. (Score:1)
mea culpa.
timothy
Embedding Perl in Mozilla (Score:3)
I know that Mozilla is very modular, but I'm not sufficiently familiar with the dynamic loading capabilities (if any) to answer your last question. I don't know if Perl glue would need to be in an XPCOM module (which is probably best) or whether it could be a "plugin" that end-users install (which might be XPCOM; I don't know), but I'm sure it must be possible to embed Perl without re-architecting Mozilla again.
I guess this is a project I could try to work on sometime (if nobody else is already doing it), although there's a lot of code I'd have to familiarize myself with before I could even begin...
Re:Clothes? (Score:2)
Bad Mojo
Re:Hmm, this says something (Score:2)
Oh, come on. Can you honestly tell me that every major program (I mean big ones, like Netscape, or IE, or Apache, not stuff like 'ls' or 'chmod') doesn't crash occasionally? I think this is a great idea, although what I'm unsure about is what exactly are they going to do? Run the entire process in a big try/catch/finally or eval block?
Of what use is a stable app on an unstable platform? You still lose IE when you lose Windows...
Hm... good point. See my comment on your "IE 5.5" statement.
darren
Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
Re:PerlScript is server-side... (Score:3)
Netscape forking from Mozilla? (Score:2)
The only way I could imagine this happening would be if the Mozilla developers took the code in some direction very different from what Netscape is willing to accept. While that's conceivable, both sides have good reason to avoid that sort of division, because of the synergy Netscape and Mozilla have when using the same codebase. (Also, while the majority of Mozilla.org's contributors remain on Netscape's payroll, they'll continue to follow Netscape's priorities.)
Re:Too ambitious? (Score:2)
I realize that this is a pre-release, but.. You must remember that there are people out there that are going to look at this and say, "blah blah IE is better, blah blah, Netscape sucks." and not care to even see the final version.
Just my worthless
Why wasn't a message saying the art. was edited? (Score:1)
Also, are we ever going to find out why slashdot.org was down so long the otherday?
our patience will be worth it (Score:2)
I'll be the first to agree that it's been a long wait. I nearly gave up. However, I'm excited to see some of the incredible things Mozilla is already capable of.
I suspect they didn't start out aiming at making Mozilla a "platform". They started by making a set of tools. As more and more tools were created to aid in the creation of the browser, a "platform" appeared as a natural result.
Re:Why Perl? (Score:3)
2) Perl is powerful.
3) If people who wrote web pages for a living knew perl, there would be better web pages.
4) Items 1-3 are the posters opinions.
Bad Mojo
Re:Clothes? (Score:1)
--Ben
Why not Perl? (Score:4)
People who write web pages for a living often have to deal with Perl already for server-side CGI scripts, unless they're an ASP or PHP shop. Perl may have a lot of features that are hard to learn, but you can start small and use just the features you do understand. Strict OO languages don't have this kind of flexibility.
As for Python, it might not be a bad idea, but there are a lot more Perl programmers out there than Python programmers. (Supporting both would be good, especially if via plugins.)
Re:I'm confused. (Score:1)
Mac interface woes (Score:4)
I hope they're planning to Aqua-ize the interface, or at least provide it as an option. The current preview is being ripped to shreds on all the Mac forums I read as ugly, nonintuitive, and just plain broken, especially in the design of the dialogs. Unfortunately, I doubt that submitting thousands of "it's not Mac-like enough" bugs to Bugzilla would necessarily help things.
However, if work keeps progressing on Fizzilla [mozilla.org] or the Rhapsody Yellow Box [mozilla.org] ports...sweeeeet.
Mostly C(++) (Score:1)
Can you imagine a browser written entirely in perl?
Re:Are Netscape exploiting the community? (Score:1)
Is it true that anyone can distribute Mozilla? And how about making money by doing so? If anyone can, why should Netscape be blamed for Mozilla throwing away their sources; that wasn't Netscape's idea. And anyway, what did RedHat ever do for Linux in its first days - OK, now it's making GNOME and stuff, but in their first days they were only profiting from free software. Well, don't we all
BTW anyway Mozilla didn't throw away
But if there are some complexities which would bind code to Netscape, I would love to have these explained, as some other projects also start using a MPLish license, and it is important to know what the restrictions are.
It's... It's...
Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:2)
String processing you say? Ever heard of Lexx and Yacc? They rock my world for string processing. Ho hum Ho Hum, lets just embed a small C compiler in Mozilla! Why the hell not! Will only add another 10 MB to the Run Time Binary! NO one would even notice!
I mean! We can even make it objective C and play with all this CORBA and OO stuff people are babling about these days.
Hell, lets just stick a VBScript interpreter in there so we can even interpret MS land pages!
Oh and while we are at it.... No perl has its place, some place with small projects and not many people to witness there creation just the result. Scripting!!?!? No more.. I just think some people dont have enough experience with perl to dislike it yet. *shrugs*
jeremy
Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:2)
2) You can already use Perl to script HTML in webpages using Internet Explorer and ActiveState's [activestate.com] ActivePerl for windows.
ActivePerl lets you use perl to write Windows Scripts, server side ASP Scripts and indeed, client side scripts inside HTML pages.
Windows' ActiveX Scripting engine and the level of componentisation in IE and Windows doesn't seem as stupid now does it?
Insightful? (Score:2)
Wasn't it a bad thing when Microsoft decided that people needed the latest version of Explorer to access and run some of their software?
Yes, but only if that software (whatever it was) did not actually need one of the components. You're point is like saying "it's wrong to distribute X application because it requires Y library".
Now Netscape doesn't want Mozilla to be just a browser but a set of tools - and have applications written specifically for and requiring Mozilla.
Yes, Mozilla does require Mozilla - this doesn't even make sense.
Re:Too ambitious? (Score:3)
In terms of how the ambition helps Mozilla itself, I think the theory is that it will prove advantageous in the long run. Remember that the reason Mozilla pretty much rebuilt Netscape from scratch was that the Netscape 4 codebase was considered so scrambled that further development on top of it just didn't make sense. Sure, it's taken forever to see Netscape 6, but now that it's built on such a well-engineered codebase, future iterations should benefit from the fact that it'll be so much easier to ferret out old bugs and add new features. That's the theory, anyway.
Francis Hwang
Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:1)
Stupid fingers don't type exactly what I think all the time.
Re:Why wasn't a message saying the art. was edited (Score:3)
Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:2)
When embedding perl into applications, libperl as a shared library starts to look attractive. (1MB isn't as bad when its shared across everything linked to libperl.so.
But I think that a perl built into the browser is a very bad idea. There are things that perl can do on my computer that I don't want some random web page designer to do. I once thought that the Safe module [cpan.org] would be the answer to untrusted perl code, but there are some flaws in it that don't seem to be easily resolved.
I believe that the problems with Safe.pm caused a halt in Penguin [cpan.org] (At the time that there was a big interest in Penguin, Felix was dismissing the advantage to embedding it into a browser. He wasn't saying that it couldn't be done, but just that it was the best use of network transported code.)
It still has problems for me. (Score:2)
Re:On Fire and Listing Badly (Score:1)
Consequently about the only feature I like about the browser is that when you want to save a slashdot page. The file is already a unique one based on the title header of the page. Very useful.
Handling tons of bug reports (Score:3)
My conclusion is that a way of doing this is using the voting feature of bugzilla, and start by fixing the bugs with the most votes. Thus, people are encouraged to see if anyone else is having the same problems they have themselves, and the time developers have to spend on finding duplicates decreases. Those who have uncommon bugs will of course be run over by this scheme :-(, but my opinion is that it is more important to help lots of people than help only a few.
Comments anyone?
Cheers
//Johan
Java will be supported anyways, so why Perl? (Score:2)
So, really, why Perl?
Re:Why Perl? (Score:1)
2) OO is powerful
3) If people who wrote applications for a living knew a good OO language there would be better applications.
4) Items 1-3 are mockery of comment #52
Re:I'm confused. (Score:2)
Last time I heard Netscape Corp isn't a monopoly. The "bad thing" you are referring too is breaking anti-trust law.
Now Netscape doesn't want Mozilla to be just a browser but a set of tools - and have applications written specifically for and requiring Mozilla.I do realize that badmouthing the big 'ol opensource project is wrong, but it seems to me that they're trying to work the same kind of muscle as Microsoft was except that everybody loves Mozilla. (except for that disappointing interface)
Pfft, last time I checked they, as does every other company, have the right to work these muscles. Creating something that works with something else isn't inherently a bad thing. Only when you use illegal tactics to gain monopoly status, then use your monopoly status to force others out of business.
Unfortunate Dependancies (Score:2)
As for using a Mozilla-based "tool set," if your application specifically uses parts of Mozilla, and thereby requires having Mozilla installed, that is no longer an artificial dependancy.
On the other hand, an outright advantage to being "Mozilla-based" is that there is some degree of "right" to redistribute the code "tuned" to your application.
On the gripping hand, this introduces some packaging problems, with either:
- Having to carefully match version identification so that Module X, deployed by The Y Group, can be safely connected to Module Z, deployed by The Prime Group, or
- Having to statically link big chunks of library into applications, so that if I install three applications that use parts of Mozilla, I effectively have nearly three independent copies of Mozilla installed at once.
Neither of these outcomes is particularly attractive at this point...Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:2)
This nicely avoids arguments on whether JavaScript should be the be-all-end-all web scripting language, or whether you should use it for system scripting. (Is it really worse than VBScript? Well, no alert(), but VB has MsgBox().)
Meanwhile JavaScript is apparently hardcoded into Mozilla. Not a huge problem right now where the public net runs on JavaScript, but in the future it would be nice to have more options when using Mozilla as an "application platform".
--
Sputnik (Score:2)
Notice as required by slashdot: The above was humor. It was only humor. It is not to be confused with anything but humor. If you saw anything besides humor, that is your fault.. the poster disclaims any liability for anything except the humorous content of this post. Poster's maximum liability is to have the reader mildly irritated. In no event shall... blah.. blah.. blah...
Re:Too ambitious? (Score:2)
The most important one : face it, Mozilla's binaries are only downloaded and tested by geeks. People who like computers, sometimes write a little bit of HTML, but nothing fabulous. Giving a Netscape-branded beta will make non-geeks HTML developers (those working with the big companies) try it and post bug reports about it, but bug reports from a different, non-technical point of view, can be very useful too.
Now we can test our java-enabled sites. Java support is quite useful for some sites.
Stéphane
Re:Java will be supported anyways, so why Perl? (Score:2)
Ooops, there they go again, counting JDK downloads as representing active developers.
And its faster, too.
Neither anecdotal nor measured benchmarks supports your conjecture.
un-bloating the lizzard (Score:2)
What I am hoping Mozilla can provide for me
is a browser that is small, fast, and
stable. I don't care if I can use it to
read news, read email, edit html, etc. etc. etc.
I'll use emacs when I need a nuclear
powered swiss army knife.
I also want my browser to support things like
client side VBscript and ActiveX as well as
JAVA 1.2.2. There are a lot of cool sites
on the web that use ActiveX, and it's
a shame that those of us who use linux
don't have access to them.
I recently started browsing with Win2K/IE5,
and no version of netscape (including 6) that
I've used can come remotely close to the
quality of browsing that I get from IE.
I would love to switch to Mozilla/Netscape 6,
but I don't want some kind of gimmicky
set of tools that supposedly does everything,
I just want a browser that is stable, fast,
and supports most content on the web.
Has anyone noticed that Netscape6 is ugly as hell? (Score:1)
Re:Why Perl? (Score:1)
BZZZT! OO has had twenty-fove years to get something, anything right. Too late. Next paradigm please. Generic programming anyone?
Re:Hmm, this says something (Score:1)
Of theoretical side interest. Isn't there nvram now avaible? You could just save IE's state every say 30 seconds to nvram and prevent the evil windows from distroying your data. Although I don't know where to get the hardware or if there is support for windows but it's just a thought
The code's available - knock yourself out :-) (Score:1)
Gerv
Re:I'm confused. (Score:2)
Complaining people are building XP Apps on top of Mozilla is like complaining that they build them on Java because it's owned by Sun, or on C because you prefer Python.
Gerv
A friend of Asa Dotzler (Score:1)
Asa, I hope you read
Anywho, I don't know how to contact you, but feel free to email me. Don't 69 the bitbucket, or mail me at my more spam-friendly address usacom@(RemoveThisSpamProtection)procyon.com. I'd love to hear from you.
Re:Too ambitious? (Score:2)
Don't worry - they are not implementing bits we don't need for shipping the browser/mailnews client etc. Yet. That comes later.
Gerv
You don't want this (Score:3)
Perl together with Safe.pm is able to provide a security model that allows people to run untrusted applets, etc. But it is not as comprehensive a system as the browser, and more importantly it is not the same system.
Something like a browser should have a single security model that there is no confusion about. If you start matching unmatched security models, well welcome to the security hole game.
Perl is a great language.
It just isn't a great language to have client-side stuff delivered in over a browser.
Cheers,
Ben
PS JavaScript, BTW, is not a very good language IMHO. If x and y are both 2, then what is x+x? It could be 4 or 22, neither variables nor operators are typed. Bad decision.
PPS Some good points for JavaScript. A lot of web programmers don't know, but should, that JavaScript objects are virtually interchangable with Perl's hashes. JavaScript also supports full closures.
Re:Why Perl? (Score:1)
No. Hype sucks, but OO is required.
2) Perl is powerful.
Yes. I would love to produce client apps with it rather than any other script language. Then again, we
Moreover, security restrictions like blocking access to file system, most sockets etc. would be required.
3) If people who wrote web pages for a living knew perl, there would be better web pages.
If people knew how to program, we would be out of jobs. Nobody knows everything, and Perl is - due to its heritage (can you hate awk?) - a difficult language to learn.
4) Items 1-3 are the posters opinions.
So why did you post them? if you submit something, it should be no less than the absolute, objective truth... er... sure?
Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:2)
The simple solution is to punt and give a warning (a la ActiveX) that this code could do nasty things and ask the user whether or not to trust the code. (Cryptographic signatures on the code would, of course, be helpful here -- as would a web of trust a la PGP.)
Keep in mind, though, that this is not necessarily only useful for web-based applications, but also for more traditional applications where the code is installed on your hard drive, and implicitly trusted. (Thereby neatly side-stepping all the thorny security implications!) Basically, in this scenario, the fact that Mozilla is a browser would be incidental; Mozilla/Perl would be used as a quick, easy, powerful platform for building powerful GUI-based user applications. Can't be any worse than Visual Basic, can it?
Dickhead moderator: the _star_ is "Flamebait" (Score:1)
------------------------------------------
"The Internet interprets censorship
as damage, and routes around it."
Re: Why Perl? Why not? (Score:1)
I do wish Pythoners had more confidence in their language. Why all the cheap shots at Perl? Python has been designed with OO from the ground up. It definitely shows. Python has a great application called Zope that highly recommends the language.
I like Perl OO. I do not like nor do I need a compile/interpreter to tell me how to code. I have a brain for that.
Maybe (eek) Microsoft does have the right answer in that maybe browsers need to have a "scripting" interface which is language neutral. That way, you can use your tool without impacting my ability to use mine.
I'd rather see more python/Perl integration. Both are great tools. Both are worth a look.
Re:Why Perl? (Score:2)
If I relied on my formal education for all my learning, I wouldn't be in computers today. There are many fine books which explain regular expressions (like Jeff Friedl's _Mastering Regular Expressions_).
If you're not a programmer, are you certain Perl has lax syntax? Are you certain what that means and why it's bad?
Perhaps you are just trolling and you've simply caught this fish.
Re:Things I Wanna Do... (Score:1)
lts faster. I don't need or ever use a pop-mailer and there are better newsreade
rs anyways. It is probably unnecesary to include html creation tools too. Just a
*STABLE* browser that will run on my alpha is all i ask for.
I will complement the development team for bringing a very modern, non-.com styl
e browser. I bet millions curse every day with Netscape when they hit 'shop' whe
n they wanted the one next to it; 'stop'. There is just something intellectually
insulting about the concept of 'shopping' and having to face it on a browser! K
eep up the good work Mozilla and good riddance to the commercialism of the big b
rowsers.
One final comment. I really like to use Mozilla as a real Unix application, mean
ing not needing to have to do a ^C to copy for instance. I'm sure these minor le
aks from outdated M$ and Mac 'standards' are being addressed now. M14 does still
have a few strange, but livable bugs. It appears to not know what to do with a
non-absolute URL and sometimes renders in strange ways. (just refresh to fix) It
sometimes doesn't know when to 'stop' and that is why i'm grateful there is no
longer the risk of hitting 'shop'. I also take note many reported bugs involve f
eatures nobody needs in a browser. It isn't an operating system afterall, or is
it? And, yes, i still seem to to be more confortable using vi to make these comm
ents and for anything else text related.
Perl has a compile phase. (Score:2)
Yes, C/C++ can be made faster than Perl. But well-written Perl code can be fast enough.
I think you could say... (Score:1)
Hopefully, those focused on the Browser component can continue to make rapid advancements and release a kick-ass product. I, personally, won't be too hyped about the platform until I see a high quality product based upon it. At the moment, the browser still suffers from some major bugs, which would be viewed from the user-perspective as being simple to fix (ex. Back/Forward/Reload buttons are still unreliable in M15 nightly builds (this is being written within M15-2000040815)).
Why even perfect code needs something like this (Score:2)
Now even if Mozilla is bugless, there is a very real potential that someone may write a really poor program (plugin,module,etc.) which is pretty buggy in and of itself. Without a crash recovery section a bug in this plugin or whatever could take down your application also and all the other non-buggy plugins/apps that were also running. And remember, you have no control over the code of what gets written as a compatable module for your software because apps/plugins/modules are developed after your software is, and are written by someone else outside your own company .
Re:Mac interface woes (Score:1)
Plus the sullivan chrome [mozillazine.org] at mozillazine feels very mac-like.
Chris
Re:The Difference between Mozilla and Netscape? (Score:1)
Oh, you mean exactly like they have done for quite a while now, and grown from 3 to 70 people along the way?
Netscape still supplies enough of the manpower for Mozilla that if they snatched it all back to fork Communicator 7.0 as a closed project they wouldn't lose that much. But the balance is changing. It looks as if by the time 6.0 is near enough done for design to begin on 7.0 that this will not be the case. (Ugh, what a sentence.)
As long as Netscape doesn't have all that much to add to Mozilla to make their product, I think things will stay the way they are. But it's a slight risk.
Re:I'm confused. (Score:1)
Yikes: format! (Score:1)
get results faster. I don't need or ever use a pop-mailer and there are
better newsreaders anyways. It is probably unnecesary to include html
creation tools too. Just a *STABLE* browser that will run on my alpha is
all i ask for.
I will complement the development team for bringing a very modern,
non-.com style browser. I bet millions curse every day with Netscape when
they hit 'shop'when they wanted the one next to it; 'stop'. There is just
something intellectually insulting about the concept of 'shopping' and
having to face it on a browser. Keep up the good work Mozilla and good
riddance to the commercialism of the big browsers.
One final comment. I really like to use Mozilla as a real Unix
application, meaning not needing to have to do a ^C to copy for instance.
I'm sure these minor leaks from outdated M$ and Mac 'standards' are being
addressed now. M14 does still have a few strange, but livable bugs. It
appears to not know what to do with a non-absolute URL and sometimes
renders in strange ways. (just refresh to fix) It sometimes doesn't know
when to 'stop' and that is why i'm grateful there is no longer the risk of
hitting 'shop'. I also take note many reported bugs involve features
nobody needs in a browser. It isn't an operating system afterall, or is
it? And, yes, i still seem to to be more confortable using vi to make
these comments and for anything else text related.
Re:Why Perl? (Score:2)
"Troll", not "DumbMarketingGuy".
Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:2)
Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:1)
I found an article on perl5porters that describes most of the current problems http:/ /www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2 000-03/msg00760.html [mpe.mpg.de]
Re:Why Perl? (Score:1)
I don't know Perl, so I don't know if it has equivalent problems, but I haven't encountered much "Perl for Windows" stuff, so I wonder what would be involved there.
Probably whatever language is choosen would need to be specialized to use the hook provided by the browser, and not require external services. (This improves "security", increases browser size, and means that pre-installed compilers need to have a duplicate installation.) Unless...
Perhaps the browser could come with a "linkage" routine in the choosen language (call it "theExtensionCord") that would enable the browser to be driven by the standard install of the language. But then non-developers would need to be installing the languages. (Maybe two versions, the plugIn and the extensionCord.. but that increases the work!)
Providing SOME general purpose (scripting) language is a good idea. It would really be nice if it was a language that I was comfortable in. A choice of languages would be even nicer. But each step of improvement requires extra work before it could be ready.
Re:Building a web browser (HOW-TO) (Score:2)
Out of interest, how much of Mozilla's development was funded by Netscape? I know a large number of the core team works for Netscape
check it out (Score:4)
This statement above, is pretty darn exciting. While many people probably think that the browser wars were just about Microsoft wanting to dominate the client-side browser (and eventually maybe the server side), it was also about Microsoft maintaining it's stranglehold on the desktop operating system. Microsoft was scared that if Netscape became the defacto standard browser, app developers could eventually write to netscape API's, thus bypassing the Windows API and effectively rendering Windows irrelevent. The reason Microsoft was so scared of Netscape was the same reason Microsoft was scared of Java -- they would lose their monopoly on the API in which application developers would have to write to.
So Netscape supposedly "lost" the browser-war. Big deal. It's round two now and Microsoft should be really scared. AOL has released a web appliance running Linux and Mozilla code. No Microsoft there. Mozilla is completely modular, cross-platform, and open-sourced so developers can build apps around it once and have complete control. No need for Microsoft here, either.
Java was a "threat" in that it threatened the dependency on window's API's. However, Sun kinda messed that up by controling it. Mozilla is Open-Sourced, and can't be controlled (or embraced and extended).
These are exciting times. Mozilla may be exactly what is needed to wrench desktop applications control away from Microsoft. If developers start writing to Mozilla API's, that's the foot in the door.
Mozilla as a platform is a pretty darn exciting idea. Maybe the Web Browser really will eventually become "part of the operating system." ^_^
Buttons I want in Mozilla skins (Score:5)
The 6 basic navigation buttons I want in every skin are:
1) back
2) forward
3) up (shortens the url by one segment)
4) reload
5) stop
6) home
In that order. Mozilla has it *almost* right, but not quite (the up button is missing).
I also want to be able to define multiple "home" buttons and have them appear beside the usual home button, in every sense equal, and not have my own buttons relegated to a space-consuming "personal tool bar".
While I'm going on about my wishes... what about all that space to the left of the "help" item? I want to be able to put the location box there, saving a whole bunch of valuable vertical real estate.
Hmm - just one more wish today - when I minimize a tool bar, how nice it would be if the space to the right of the little tab were transparent, winning me back a tiny bit more vertical real-estate, instead of opaque, empty space.
Thanks in advance, skin hackers, for taking this seriously
--
OO Nazis... (Score:2)
The beautiful thing about Perl's approach to object orientedness is it doesn't assume any specific definition of OO. You can use whichever features of OO appropriate to the task at hand.
Since OO theory is a developing construct, many other interpretations of OO theory take a snapshot of current OO theory at some given point. But then, as the theory evolves, the static model is left behind. The compiler must then be updated, thrown out, or rewritten.
Because Perl as a language is based on the idea that "there is more than one way to do it," it was only natural that it adopt a dynamic model which allows new developments to be integrated into the OO theory it uses at a later date.
Re:Why Perl? (Score:2)
I have already addressed this point in the other thread, Cross-Platform Development Tools? [slashdot.org]
OO{P/D} is not some silver bullet that will solve all your design issues, and Stroustrup knows that: He left the programming paradigm to the PROGRAMMER. (Functional/Procedural programming DOES have it's place, as does OO.)
If you want detailed info., check out this book:
Multi-Paradigm Design for C++ [amazon.com]
Cheers
"Black Holes are where God divided by Zero." -- Anonymous
Exporerzilla? (Score:4)
It seems to me this would take a lot of wind out of Mozilla's sails. Does the world really need two open-source browsers? And with a majority of the end-user installed base, an open MSIE could very well grab a larger chunk of developer effort.
PerlScript in the browser (Score:2)
Besides, I was envisioning more than just generating dynamic HTML; I was thinking of bindings that would allow Perl to integrate cleanly with XUL and make fully interactive applications on a portable platform (Mozilla) that would be (hopefully) easier to program than most other cross-platform GUI framework solutions...
Re:Why not Perl? (Score:2)
Get real. Object oriented langauges are better suited to object oriented programming. Perl is not an object oriented language. You do the math.
Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:2)
Yeah! Censorship! Who needs political dissention?! (Score:2)
Bob: Besides, who needs to remember that a red star represents revolution, not communism, or the fact that any and every political system out there can be twisted to create a dictatorship - what was Pinochet, if not a capitalist? What did McCarthy preside over, if not show-trials?
Joe: You said it, Bob - anyone questioning the political conformity of the day can almost certainly be traced back to either Stalin, Mao or Hitler - so what's the point of listening to them? I mean, come on! The government-men arn't stupid... they know what's best for us!
Re:Too ambitious? (Score:3)
Even the early browsers had API's for plugins, API's for automation, etc. It's been quite possible, for quite a long time, to build applications that work entirely from the browser. All Mozilla does is make those applications significantly more powerful.
Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be easier to embed Mozilla in emacs? No one would notice an extra 5MB to the emacs binary, and it already has scriptability. And I know everyone, especially perl fanatics, loves LISP!
A logical refutation of previous post (Score:2)
Did you actually read and understand what advid was saying? By the statement you make above we are led to believe that you have not understood his remarks. Advid describes the difference between the realization of the communist idea as opposed to the intrinsic qualities of that idea. Through corollary we can deduce that you claim that the idea itself is the same as its realization. I don't mean to pull a "Socrates" on you but to come to the truth of the matter we need to logically dissect your statements. You have declared that there is something intrinsically evil about communism. I think that we need to take a look as some definitions here.
intrinsic adj 1: belonging to a thing by its very nature; "form was treated as something intrinsic, as the very essence of the thing"- John Dewey [syn: intrinsical] [ant: extrinsic]
Source: WordNet ® 1.6, © 1997 Princeton University
intrinsic ( n-tr n z k, -s k) adj.
1. Of or relating to the essential nature of a thing; inherent.
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1996, 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
communism \Com"mu*nism\, n. [F. communisme, fr. commun common.] A scheme of equalizing the social conditions of life; specifically, a scheme which contemplates the abolition of inequalities in the possession of property, as by distributing all wealth equally to all, or by holding all wealth in common for the equal use and advantage of all. Note: At different times, and in different countries, various schemes pertaining to socialism in government and the conditions of domestic life, as well as in the distribution of wealth, have been called communism.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
As we can see, the word intrinsic is an adjective (used to describe a noun.) In our case the noun is "evil" and the word "intrinsic" is applied to that noun in reference to the target "thing" or "it" as the definition refers, this "thing" or "it" being communism. Or, "communism is intrinsically evil." We will address the validity of that statment later.
The logical error involved in the total statement of yours comes in when you say that there is something "intrinsically" wrong with the idea and try to prove this through the citing of imperfect instances of its implementation. It is not a logical error to say that something is "intrinsically" wrong if it is in the nature of the thing to be wrong but it IS a logical error to say that a system is "intrinsically" wrong if it has been implemented in a way that goes AGAINST the very nature [intrinsic] of the system. At this point a separation is made between the ideal and the actual. The implementation of communism at the hands of Stalin and Mao is contrary to the philosophical basis [very nature] of communism (see the definition above.) Advid has said as much in his statement.
It seems that you have overlooked the main point of Advid's post by missinterpreting the meaning of the word "intrinsic", unless you intended to imply that the end product defines the intrinsic qualities of an idea. This is a very dangerous statement to make because of the circular argument that arises. Analyzing your statements with the definition of intrinsic we can see that it is logically inconsitent to claim that an action that takes place after the creation of something defines the creation of the said thing.
By you saying that communism is intrinsically evil, and by using the definition of the word intrinsic we can extrapolate equivalent statements "Evil belongs to communism by communisms very nature." Or "communism is evil by its very nature." This statement can be logically refuted. I bet you could read all the communist literature (real, not propaganda) and NOT ever come up with a statement that says that communism is evil. We can say that Stalin and Mao are evil because of their actions, but we can not say that communism is evil because they chose to implement it in ways contrary to its purpose. Now if you want to claim that the end product defines the beginning ideal, by all means try, but be prepared for a firestorm of debate following this idea. There are probably more instances of misuse of an ideal than there are of proper use.
In programmer's language : Improper use of the C++ language (exceeding array bounds) does not make C++ an evil or wrong language. This makes the person who implements the language incorrectly evil or wrong in their implementation of the language.
Sorry this is so long.
Random_Task
Re:Perl has a compile phase. (Score:2)
However, the internal form is still not the same as the machine's internal form, so you always lose some performance.
And what is "fast enough" anyway? You going to claim I can use perl for my week-long 1+GB computational chemistry runs? Sorry, but no way.
Fast enough to handle CGI scripts? sure, but so is /bin/sh (small ones, big ones I'll admit repeated invocations of awk might be.... unwise)
ahem sorry for the ranting, but this is out of hand.
Summary:
Re:Why wasn't a message saying the art. was edited (Score:2)
Actually, I was very curious about that myself, considering that the slashdot stats claim an uptime of 77 days.
I wouldn't say we're in a position to demand answers, but I've very surprised they haven't been forthcoming, especially since it sounds like it was just a communication link outage.
__________
Re:up / top button (Score:2)
Couldn't find it, so I posted it myself. Here ya go. [mozilla.org]
--
Re:Handling tons of bug reports (Score:3)
What would really fix that is a karma system
and the time developers have to spend on finding duplicates decreases.
Some net-community people (including me) do search for dups among bugs they haven't reported themselves, and I hope that saves the engineers some time keeping the bugzilla system clean and also reducing the change of duplicated coding work.
--
Re:You don't want this (Score:2)
Just because it doesn't understand that "2" is a number and not a string doesn't mean that the language is bad.
And btw, the answer to your question is simple. if x is 2 then x+x is 4. If you meant to say that x is 2 and y is 2 and x+y is the question, then the answer is still 4. If either x or y is "2" (a string) the answer will be "22" (a new string with length 2, containing "22").
Re:Perl has a compile phase. (Score:2)
You're right, the internal form is not machine code, so the execution of that form is effectively a mini-interpreter/virtual machine. On the other hand, work has been done on compiling Perl to C, which would give you machine code in the end -- this isn't quite ready for prime time yet, but a "real" Perl compiler is in the works.
"Fast enough" means that for many purposes, the extra (and undisputed) speed you can get from recoding in C/C++ isn't really worth the trouble. Would I use Perl for heavy-duty numerical analysis? Probably not. Would I consider using it for a complex application or network server? Yes.
As an example of "fast enough", I recently wrote a small network server in Perl with a select() loop handling multiple TCP/IP connections in parallel with a multiprotocol object-oriented implementation. This server was intended to be an XML-based database server, which worked reasonably well. However, as an experiment, I added minimal HTTP protocol support to the same server, enough to do a GET successfully. Out of curiosity, I had a co-worker do a performance test with his Java-based testing program. I don't recall the exact results, but with 10-20 separate threads hitting the server 10-20 times per second, the average response time was something like 30-50ms. For what I needed, that was fast enough.
By the way, CGI programs aren't a good showcase for Perl's performance, since you pay the overhead of initializing the Perl interpreter and compiling the program for every hit. The Apache mod_perl module is a much better example. (IMDB uses mod_perl for complex database queries and dynamic HTML generation, and it's on the top-20 list of largest sites with fast response times. Is that fast enough?)
Yes, you can easily find examples where Perl won't be fast enough, and in those cases you should write the program in C/C++ for performance. However, in many cases, well-written Perl code will be fast enough. (Keep in mind that a Quicksort in BASIC is preferable to a bubble sort in optimized assembler -- good algorithms are more important than language efficiency.)
In the end, I agree with you. Use what works for you. For me, that's often Perl -- I can write code in Perl much faster than in C, because it's more powerful and saves you from hassles such as memory management. My time is often more valuable than the computer's time, and if I can save 90% of my time for other projects for runtime performance that's 2-3 time slower, that's fine with me as long as the slower runtime is fast enough...
Re:Why not Perl? (Score:2)
I've seen clean, well-written object-oriented code written in C before; object-oriented programming is more of a programming discipline and architectural design question than a language feature issue. Language features are largely syntactic sugar. (Nice sugar to have, unquestionably, but still syntactic sugar.)
Re:Just think what Perl could do... (Score:2)
Do it yourself? (Score:2)
In point of fact, I am seriously considering working on this myself. It's always a tough decision where to focus attention -- I have many more projects I'm interested in than I have time to devote to them. Because this one is particularly interesting, I suspect it may end up fairly high on the list...