Mozpad Musings
I’ve been thinking lately about Mozpad and its raison d’être. I can’t seem to shake the feeling that the purpose of the organization is not entirely clear, and that this will turn into a major barrier to achieving something useful. I’m starting to understand why some people (particularly Simon Lucy of Joost, who deserves credit for raising this issue) were pushing to get a clear mission statement formulated.
I originally conceived of Mozpad as a “user group” for people developing on top of Mozilla. But I’m coming around to the view that this doesn’t give it enough to do considering that Mozilla itself is an open source project and has many open forums for developers (something Mike Shaver pointed out). If I want to ask a technical question, I’d rather go to one of the newsgroups or IRC channels where I can reach the broadest possible community of Mozilla core and application developers. And that’s most of what a user group does.
This isn’t to say that we don’t have great and useful action items. But I feel that we would benefit from more clarity of purpose. Specifically, I’m beginning to think that Mozpad should aim to create and distribute a real product. People should be able to go to mozpad.org to get the latest version of the platform and access documentation, demos and other materials (hosted locally or through links to the appropriate mozilla.org). As I’ve made clear, I believe that a truly usable SDK is a must so that people don’t have to go through the fiery crucible of the build system as their very first experience with Mozilla (the software development equivalent of spending a week as a crash test dummy before being allowed to buy a car). I’m also a huge fan of the IDE-in-Eclipse idea. The nice thing is that none of this contradicts our existing action items, it just gives us a better handle on where we are heading.
In fact, I’d like to brand the platform “Mozpad”. It’s a cool name for a platform although it wasn’t conceived as such. There might be some issues with this, however, which I’m looking into.
What do people think of a Mozpad product based on Mozilla, with an SDK, IDE and platform documentation so that it is a viable choice for people who want to develop “rich internet applications” or other multiplatform software? Am I seeing a problem where there isn’t one? Is this far too ambitious? Personally I can’t invest silly amounts of time into this, so if this doesn’t jibe with what other people were hoping to get from Mozpad then it’s not going to fly.
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If the mozpad crew wanted to start building and testing SDK spins for the various update versions, I think we could find some space for them on the community build hosts, and I know a lot of developers would be glad to see them!
Comment by shaver — 8/22/2007 @ 5:37 pm
Generally speaking, I like this, but it’s going to take a bit of actual product planning to make this a concrete goal. What would the product do?
Comment by Alex Vincent — 8/23/2007 @ 7:10 am
I think the idea of having a Mozpad product(s) is awesome, and depending on what they are would feel privileged to help.
I really am waiting to see what the final 1.0 release of Adobe AIR looks like though. Because if that meets my requirements, then I may be in more of a maintenance mode when it comes to XULRunner app development.
The main question is do you want to primarily help build a platform product or build apps on a platform? I haven’t been able to convince myself to really dedicate to helping build a platform. Especially when the core driver’s of that platform seem to be wanting the exact opposite than Mozpad. The MozComm seem to be clearly stating that their primary interest is in the “Web platform” (HTML/JS/CSS), instead of a XUL platform (XUL/XBL/JS/CSS). Just seems to all be conflicting, and makes for a very foggy outlook.
I’m all for being a pioneer and diving in, but it looks as if there are some rocks lying directly under the surface.
Comment by enefekt — 8/23/2007 @ 3:10 pm
Wasn’t quite sure what this new command-line launching of XUL apps in Firefox 3 means. I’ll have to read more about it to see whats possible/feasible.
Comment by enefekt — 8/23/2007 @ 3:25 pm
Agree having something tangible should galvanize people.
Plenty of ideas:
- Binding another language (or two) other than JS to XUL
- SDK
- Expanding on existing FUEL work
- IDE
I think it’s important that you learn from the past. It seems that from roughly 2002-2004 there was a lot of momentum behind XUL in general, including towards the above ideas.
Why did the first wave of XUL enthusiasm fall flat?
What has to be done (evangelism/marketing/planning) in the medium term to ensure the current resurgence in interest is maintained?
Comment by pd — 8/23/2007 @ 3:59 pm
I’m totally interested in the platform though not sure whether the distinction between web apps and desktop apps is as valid as people make it out to be. XUL is also a big question mark for me (stay tuned).
Comment by Matt — 8/23/2007 @ 4:31 pm
I like most of what you are suggesting here. I have been thinking of mozpad as the unofficial mozilla platform for a while now. With Mozilla corp looking more and more like Firefox corp I think it would be great to step up and make some cool products out of the mozilla platform. I don’t happen to like the eclipse ide, besides that I’m on board!
Comment by Twentyafterfour — 8/24/2007 @ 12:13 am
thank you nice sharing
Comment by cep program — 5/14/2008 @ 8:59 pm