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This is a presentation about XUL and Mozilla Application Framework.

Presented it at DERI Reading group some time ago. Now putting some slides online and this is the first of them.

[ XUL + RDF + JavaScript + CSS ] forms a framework used to build all Mozilla applications and Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, ... extensions. There is also XBL and XPCOM for more demanding applications. It is interesting that this framework is one of first widespread uses of RDF (even though you might not be aware that it has RDF under the hood).

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"Harnessing the Mozilla Platform" - a presentation by Brian King - contains a more detailed description of the Mozilla Application Framework, including this architecture diagram:

An interesting and promising development is PyXPCOM which lets you access XPCOM objects from Python, to create your own XPCOM components and to embed Gecko engine in Python application.

It allows to write Mozilla applications in Python, which I would prefer over JavaScript.

Question: according to the Mozilla architecture figure above the script layer can be JavaScript or Python. Does this mean that Firefox extensions can be written in Python now?

Answer: No, you should not write Firefox extensions in Python. Firefox does not come with PyXPCOM built-in and you would have to build it yourself in order for such extensions to run. See more details in comments. Thanks, Brendan!

Technorati Tags: firefox | mozilla | python | xpcom | xul