Hey Rick, > I am not sure when apples vs. oranges might apply to this analogy, but > Firefox has been building up their support for apps. Would it be easier all > the way around for you to build an extension/app > that would be installed within Firefox and then run as an application. I am > thinking along the lines of Prism (formerly WebRunner), which is being > integrated to some extent into Firefox 4.
To me, it's mostly a matter of packaging/deployment, since the underlying technology is Mozilla for all of this. For Firefox extensions, there's a little extra code we use to overlay the Tools menu to give us an entry-point for launching the client. Firefox can also be used as a direct replacement for xulrunner, insomuch as you can invoke an application like this: firefox -app application.ini Historically, the client was a Mozilla plugin, and then a Firefox extension, during initial development. However, at the time, the browser was able to self-upgrade itself out from under add-ons, even if the add-on would be incompatible with the new Mozilla version. There was also a bias against "web apps" amongst our librarians/management at the time, so we stuck with xulrunner for stability and for the appearance of being a normal local application (the idea was that most upgrades would happen on the server-side through changes to the remote XUL). For Prism, presumably we'd just need to create a webapp bundle, though it might have an expectation for less privileged code than what we're using. > Benefits, assuming I understand it correctly, would be the ability to > maintain one client that would work across different operating systems, as > well as the capability to run offline. Okay, so we already have client-side code that can run across different operating systems (it'd be all the stuff in the build/ folder), but the missing link here is the runtime, which has to be compiled specifically for the operating environment. This runtime could be xulrunner, it could be Firefox (which has its own xulrunner runtime), and it could be Prism (which also has its own xulrunner runtime). With xulrunner alone, we have an advantage of being in control of the exact version of xulrunner used. With Firefox, we have an advantage in that some Firefox extensions can help with development/debugging of the client. Firefox is also widely deployed. But as an added layer on top of xulrunner, getting fixes for certain Firefox bugs may necessitate different versions of the underlying xul libraries, and that's more opaque to us. Add-in plugins/extensions, and it's even scarier to me (though Jetpack will alleviate much of that, even if the client wouldn't work as a Jetpack extension). My Ubuntu version of Firefox breaks patron registration in the staff client and I have no idea why. It works with the Ubuntu-packaged xulrunner. Prism, that's filling some of the gaps that xulrunner was supposed to accomplish, and that's managing multiple apps on the same runtime. Xulrunner can do this, but the presentation/end-user experience isn't there (this may have changed since I last looked, but I don't think you can do something like xulrunner -install-app and have it create app menu options, desktop shortcuts, etc for you). The staff client already has an offline component, and this doesn't change with any of these options, and we don't gain any new offline options using any of these. My personal inclination is to focus on xulrunner, since I find it more predictable/grokkable without extra layers/applications running on top of it. -- Jason Etheridge | VP, Tactical Development | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source | phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457) | email: ja...@esilibrary.com | web: http://www.esilibrary.com
