Developers building on the Mozilla platform have many resources available to them for extending the core Mozilla apps, primarily Firefox and Thunderbird. Developers can build plugins using the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) and its newer cousin, the npruntime scriptability API. The NPAPI offers more secure options for content-type handling and integration with external applications than Microsoft's ActiveX technology.
Developers can also leverage the Mozilla component model to override or replace Mozilla components with others. RDF (the Resource Description Format) offers yet another API, and is currently used in both Firefox and Thunderbird.
But the most popular API is the XML User Interface Language (XUL), the base upon which Mozilla applications are built. It makes extending Mozilla apps almost as easy as writing webpages.
Eich also discusses future Mozilla APIs, among them WHAT-WG and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) support, and potentially Python scripting. Eich wants to make it easier to remix your Mozilla apps and envisions current Mozilla applications being instances of a larger API called Xul Runner.
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Brendan Eich is responsible for architecture and the technical direction of Mozilla. He is charged with authorizing module owners, owning architectural issues of the source base and writing the "roadmap" that outlines the direction of the Mozilla project.
Eich created JavaScript, did the work through Navigator 4.0, and helped carry it through international standardization. Before Netscape, he wrote operating system and network code for SGI; and at MicroUnity, wrote micro-kernel and DSP code, and did the first MIPS R4K port of gcc, the GNU C compiler.
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This presentation is one of a series from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held in San Diego, California, March 14-17, 2005.
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