XBLinJS

XBLinJS 0.4.1 is released. In the unlikely event your browser has SVG support built in, see the SVG Widget demo. Simple, but real.

One of the promises of XBLinJS was that you'd be able to use it for more than just HTML. I have to admit that at the time, I was only about 80% certain that I could do that. But I saw this article, and combined with the recent market successes of Firefox and some personal projects of interest that could be used there, I took a few hours tonight and tried to create an SVG Widget.

XBLinJS 0.4 is released now. The promised "interesting widget" turned out to be a conversion of a Javascript Shell from elsewhere on the net; see the demo page, at the bottom. The main point of this release, aside from the aforementioned Javascript Console, is the big internal changes in the release. Be sure to read the CHANGELOG. One of the side effects of this big change is that XBLinJS can now actually be used as a replacement for XBL; see the Advanced Uses page.

I finally have a job, a real job, though I don't start until May 9th. For a while after that I will have an overlap between my real job and my last contract job, but after that, I hope to finally have some time to spend with a clear conscience on my open source projects that I want to work on, especially Iron Lute which has been seriously neglected (though not quite ignored).

There is a very nice Javascript Console available at http://www.squarefree.com/shell/shell.html; I've ported it into XBLinJS to replace the hacky little one I had written. I've tweaked it up a bit and also removed a little bit of functionality; in particular you can't start up the Console from a bookmarklet in the context of the original page, and it is easier to create subclasses with customized shell commands and keyboard shortcuts.

During a bit of development downtime here, I've been working on making XBLinJS work on any ol' DOM nodes, not just HTML ones. Which, most notably today, means that you can in theory use XBLinJS as a drop-in replacement for the actual, factual XBL. It also means it can be used with other document structures that use DOM and the same basic event structure, like perhaps SVG someday. If we're extra good developers, we may someday see widgets that successfully integrate both XUL and SVG at the same time.

Features are always in flux until such time as the release occurs, but here is the current plan for 0.4: XBLinJS currently is built on the assumption that if node is a Javascript-reflected DOM node, node.setAttribute(name, value) is the same as node[name] = value. Nope. I thought I was setting up a system whereby you could always say blah.setAttribute(name, value) and it would Just Work whether or not blah was a node or a Widget.

XBLinJS version 0.3 is released; get it at SourceForge. A demo page is available, though at the moment I think it will still only impress serious Javascript programmers. For people who don't really care about XBLinJS per se, but do care about web development issues, you may wish to check out my dangerously-close-to-rant statements about my experiences with Mozilla's technologies. (The only things saving them from being a rant is that I propose that XBLinJS, or at least something like it, is a solution to the issues I raise; I tend to think of rants as things with little or no constructive value.

JSON is pretty cool for what it is; in a mix of dynamic languages where Javascript (most likely in a browser) is involved it may not be a bad choice. It's even a great choice if you're firing structured data back and forth from Javascript and something else. But for it's "core competency" of interfacing with Javascript, I've found there is a better approach, though it may integrate JSON into the mix.

I've released XBLinJS 0.2, which includes some example widgets and much better documentation.