Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

So, there’s a reason why I haven’t posted about the Mozilla Developer Day event I attended nearly two weeks ago: it just didn’t leave an impression on me. Kudos to the Mozilla team for the effort, and I appreciated the opportunity, but it just didn’t seem to gel. Three things come to mind:

- XUL is cool. You can build all kind of widgety web apps with JavaScript glue. Unfortunately, it’s not very clear what Netscape wants to do with it. Do they want developers to flock to it? Do they want it to supplant HTA or VB desktop apps? Or is it just a cool toy? It doesn’t look like AOL/Netscape have any plans to do anything significant with it. Maybe they need a XUL Evangelist? (random thought: it just occured to me that XUL might be useful for building interfaces for iPlanet portal products. Maybe.)

- It was fun watching Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, give his little status report on the Mozilla project as it approaches a 1.0 release. I seem to remember him mentioning that feature creep was hampering the project and that nice-to-have stuff like native SVG support should be tossed in favor of fixing existing bugs. He talked a bit about memory issues and performance. Brendan has a unique, rather pleasant personality trait in which he can talk to a total stranger as if he’d worked alongside that person for years.

- Cool demos: Classworks, an educational management tool written as a XUL application; SmartClient, a JavaScript application environment; also, a demo of the TIBET development environment (featured once before on this site) which introduces things like object dependency, collection classes, and Smalltalk-like features into JavaScript.

In the end, I left with the impression that web apps are still cool, people are still interested in doing crazy things in the browser, JavaScript will continue to play an important part in the development of web apps and services, that there will eventually be a Mozilla 1.0 release. But I didn’t really learn much that I could take away and use in day-to-day development. Still, it was nice.

Postscript: I didn’t link to the recent release of Netscape 4.79 on this site. Jeffrey Zeldman already did a good job of covering why Netscape (iPlanet, actually) continues to release (or in his words, “poop out”) new versions of this junker.