Jazilla Milestone 2 ReleasedMonday August 4th, 2003Adam Hauner wrote in to tell us that Jazilla Milestone 2 has been released. The Jazilla project aims to rewrite Mozilla in Java. Check out the Jazilla M2 Release Notes and Changelog for more details and download a Jazilla binary from SourceForge.net. The next milestone, Jazilla M3, will feature a major rewrite of the renderer code. To save you the strain of looking at my silly and horribly incomplete ChangeLog: some CSS support, Some JavaScript support (even though commenting out one line will comment out the rest) for navigator.* and document.getElementById(). (document.createElement() is turned on, but you can't do anything with it, except create b and span tags). Even though our tables still suck. (Tip: To detect Jazilla, all you have to do is: if (navigator.product == "Javagator"). ) (do that BEFORE any "//" comments). See http://home.iprimus.com.au/mcbridematt/navigator.png. Oh, if you downloaded a binary, and find some site which isn't working (i.e the XML parser in Jazilla closes the pipe due to syntax errors), add them to http://jazilla.netfirms.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?s=9fd2df25d8346905643d07eabb31187c;act=ST;f=1;t=1 When Jazilla will have better useragent string then Java/<version>? Note that the useragent only affects JavaScript at the moment. Actual HTTP GET's will still use "J2SE 1.x.xx" or whatever they are. You probably want to have a look at the DevEdge DOM xref at http://devedge.netscape.com/library/xref/2002/client-data/ . You may not know this, but Mozilla implements ALL of the DOM functions. And By M3, Jazilla along with Mozilla will both trounce IE when it comes to implementing DOM. (The renderer rewrite, by the way, is needed, in part, to correctly implement the DOM, as it wasn't originally designed for 'dynamic' pages) I don't get it? How is Jazilla related to Mozilla? It does not use Gecko or a Java port of Gecko? Does it share any sources or architectural designs? Because: * Netscape had a go at doing the same thing. (JavaGator, officially codenamed Xena or Maui depending on who you asked. The project failed in the end, with only the MailNews component - Grendel, and the JavaScript engine[2] being released as open source) * We use XUL for the UI. Infact, the Jazilla GUI is just a hacked SeaMonkey port. * Our renderer should behave the same as Gecko. We don't care how KHTML/Opera/IE/whatever does it, if Gecko gets it wrong, we should get it wrong too.. No arguments will be entered in to on how Jazilla should render a page as compared to anything other than Gecko. * Java lacks a standards-compliant renderer. i.e JTextPane can take CSS from a style="" attribute. But not from a style tag. Jazilla, as of M2 Beta, is able to take CSS from both[1] [1] Restrictions, i.e the tag which the stlye applies to apply. [2] Netscape needed a JS engine for JavaGator. But in the end, executives "forgot" that it existed To be honest... I didn't expect the release to make news on MozillaZine. Thanks for trying to clear this up... I guess I'm not totally lost now, just lost. So the goal is to create a new XML/CSS rendering engine in Java from scratch? Or maybe based on JTextPane? Are you going to implement a XML+CSS XUL rendering engine or are you just generating Swing components from the XUL files? (I did read the FAQ but it didn't anwser much ;-)) Its not completely from scratch. The XUL part is forked off jXUL and cannot render HTML components. (not yet anyway). All it does really is create Swing components from XUL and allows the developer to control them from JavaScript. But it is around ~60% compatible with Mozilla. The HTML engine is from scratch, however. It goes back to 2000 when Andy Trip and Matthew Schmidt created it. It was later forked and refactored by the NetBrowser project and now its back with us :). The only problem is that it lays out tables as if it were a Swing app. And judging from info in the web archive, Jazilla appears to have been a moz.org module at one stage. who think that Mozilla is just too fast! Java might be fun for language purists and whatnot, but I've yet to have a *single* positive experience as the end user of a java application. > I've yet to have a *single* positive experience as the end user of a java application. I would have said that until I used Eclipse (eclipse.org). SWT! -wg <>< Chances are you have used a Java app disguised as a real one. LimeWire is an example. MacOS X runs Java apps as if they were native ones (Java is listed as a GUI toolkit for that platform). The only problem is a lack of a good native Java compiler. gcj is getting better, but it isn't complete yet. As for the "who think that Mozilla is just too fast" comment.. well maybe. I ran M18 and Netscape 6 when I had a 233MHz Cyrix MII, and I don't think Gecko was slow back then. So, I downloaded this new milestone, how do I get it to actually run? Same way as M1. $ java org.jxul.xulrunner.Main or $ java -Ddebug=true org.jxul.xulrunner.Main mcbridematt, is Jazilla based on an older version of the Mozilla code? Do you plan to eventually release a new Jazilla milestone corresponding to each new Mozilla/Firebird release (to port over the new features/fixes), or will Jazilla have its own separate development path? |