XUL Runner?!

A couple of weeks ago (thanks to my handy Firefox t-shirt) I ran into a super-smart young guy on BART.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/josh/
http://josh.trancesoftware.com/

I ended up hanging out this weekend with him and a friend of his named Alex. We wound up talking about the future of GUI application deployment (Since the topic pretty much consumes every waking moment for me these days). He and his friend both are doing some work this summer in Mountain View for the Mozilla Foundation and turned me on to something that's pretty damn exciting.

I had this idea a couple of weeks ago - what if I could wrap up the XUL foundation classes, download, install and instantiate the Flash Player for whatever platform the user was on, and ultimately deploy a single, distributed application that will run from the web within whatever browser you have, but also offer (with roughly identical code) a downloadable, installable, more feature-rich, occasionally-connected version of that application? What if we could combine the in-browser ubiquity of the Flash Platform, with the small footprint and easy installation of the desktop XUL platform? Could this possibly work? Ali and I have talked about it a bit and neither of us really have the skills to be ripping out C++ code from the Mozilla project, but we were preparing to try anyway!

As it turns out - Josh and Alex turned me on to XULRunner, a thin, installable implementation of the XUL runtime without Firefox, Mozilla or any other specific application. Of course it's not really released yet, but it sounds like we'll be able to distribute applications as singular binaries or bundles on any platform at some point this summer. For now, thanks to the nature of open source - we can download nightly builds and learn about this thing!

Here's how to get started:

1) Get the exe:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/nightly/latest-trunk/

2) Put it somewhere you'll remember... I unzipped into:
C:/Program Files/Mozilla XULRunner/

3) Update your path so that xulrunner refers to this location.

4) Download the simple-browser example:
http://friedfish.homeip.net/~darinf/xulrunner/mybrowser.html

5) From wherever you unzip it, open a command prompt and run:
xulrunner application.ini

Here are a few other links that I found useful:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/XUL:Xul_Runner

http://blogs.acceleration.net/ryan/archive/2005/05/06/1073.aspx

http://developer-test.mozilla.org/en/docs/XULRunner

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6421