[jifty-devel] Fwd: A plan for XUL::App

[Jesse Vincent]

On Sep 8, 2007, at 10:02 AM, Agent Zhang wrote:

> Hi, folks!
>
> I'd forward the following mail to jifty-devel and seek opinions from
> the Jifty people ;)
>
Ok. This is _really_ cool. It might be interesting to work with clkao  
on his jifty-clientside stuff, as it's partially about converting  
jifty apps to js to run on the clientisde. so you could possibly get  
jifty validators and canonicalizers and actions that don't ever hit  
the server ;)

> Thanks!
>
> -agentz
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Agent Zhang <agentzh at gmail.com>
> Date: Sep 8, 2007 9:10 PM
> Subject: A plan for XUL::App
> To: jianing.yang at alibaba-inc.com
>
> I've been mostly working on a Firefox extension last week and I've
> already got a first (naive) implementation. My $boss got very happy
> when I offered him a link to my .xpi file.
>
> The buzzword of this extension is that there's NO xul in the source
> tree. Template::Declare generates all the ugly XML/XUL/RDF stuff for
> me, including  install.rdf. Hmm, maybe this will be the first Firefox
> extension in the world produced by Jifty's Template::Declare module.
> Hooray!
>
> Also, jquery.js is a godsend for the Javascript part, it works
> seamlessly between XUL and HTML DOMs.
>
> This extension will soon be open sourced and the resulting .xpi file
> will also been uploaded to addons.mozilla.org, according to my $boss
> :)
>
> In the next week, I'll work on the architecture refactoring for this
> project. In particular, I'd love to invent a new application framework
> for XUL development. It'll be called XUL::App. I'm going to steal a
> lot of good ideas from Jifty. Here's some random thoughts:
>
>    $ xulapp app --name MyExtension  # create a directory tree
> structure rooted at ./MyExtension/
>    Creating new application MyExtension
>    Creating directory lib
>    Creating directory lib/MyExtension
>     Writing file lib/MyExtension/App.pm
>    Creating directory lib/
>    Creating directory bin
>    Creating directory doc
>    Creating directory t
>    Creating directory jslib
>
>     $ cd MyExtension
>     $ xulapp view --name TreeView --out  treeview.xul
>     Writing file lib/MyExtension/View/TreeView.pm
>     Updating file lib/MyExtension/App.pm
>
>     $ xulapp debug treeview.xul  # will launch a Firefox window
> loading treeview.xul
>     $ xulapp bundle  # will generate  install.rdf, chrome.manifest,
> and then package related stuff into a .xpi file
>
> And lib/MyExtension/Application.pm will probably look like this
> (Thanks to Audrey's Object::Declare!):
>
>     package MyExtension::Application;
>     use XUL::App::Schema {
>         xulfule 'foo.xul' =>
>             generated from {
>                  'MyExtension::View::Foo' => { template => 'foo',
> arguments => [...] },
>             },
>             includes [qw( foo.js foo.cs )];
>
>         xulfile 'browser-overlay.xul' =>
>              generated from 'MyExtension::View::Overlay',
>              overlays 'chrome://browser/content/browser.xul';
>
>         jsfile 'foo.js' =>
>             requires [qw( bar.js dom.js jquery.js )];
>
>         xpifile 'foo.xpi' =>
>             id is 'myextension at foo.bar.org ',
>             name is 'MyExtension',
>             version is '0.0.1',
>             targets {
>                 Firefox => ['1.5' => '3.0a5'],
>                 Mozilla => [' 1.0' => '1.8'],
>             },
>             creator is 'Agent Zhang',
>             developers are [qw( John Mary ... )],
>             updateURL is ' http://foo.bar.org/update';
>     };
>
> Currently XUL::App is focused on FF extension development, so there
> will be no server-side logic in the near future.
>
> Modern Jifty apps use Template::Declare for their "view", and so will
> XUL::App :) Jifty also has cool concepts like "model" and "actions".
> Not sure how "actions" fit in the XUL world, but I can see XUL's RDF
> and its wrappers are good parallels to "models". Maybe XUL::App's
> model classes will simply emit JS and RDFS code for certain RDF
> schemes defined there.
>
> Unlike Jifty, XUL::App will look more like a compiler. We'll use 100%
> Perl (as well as a lot of JS for sure) during the development phase,
> but 0% Perl in the final .xpi package for deployment. So there won't
> be any portability issues nor any big runtime that slows things down.
> Yay!
>
> For the test suite part, I'd really love to see a DOM lib for
> SpiderMonkey or even Test::WWW::Mechanize::AJAX on CPAN soon. Testing
> XUL/AJAX in bare command line w/o launching any real web browser will
> simply rock ;)
>
> Yeah, I'm writing down crazy plans...putter++ once said on #perl6 that
> such things are very bad for expectation management...but anyway...
>
> Suggestions and comments will be greatly appreciated. Thank you :)
> _______________________________________________
> jifty-devel mailing list
> jifty-devel at lists.jifty.org
> http://lists.jifty.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/jifty-devel
>

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