ActiveState Blog » mixedpuppy

PyWorks and XULRunner

mixedpuppy — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:25:35 +0000

Today I am in Atlanta at PyWorks, about to give my talk on "Gui Applications with XULRunner, PyXPCOM and PyDOM". While developing the talk I discovered xrtemplate, a great little project with a few issues. I fixed up the template and got things working well for OSX. I'll get my patches back to the author, but in the meantime you can download my version here, as well as the slides for my talk.

Download pyworks2008.pdf

Download xrtemplate-0.2.zip

The best free XML Editor!

mixedpuppy — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:22:53 +0000

About.com has proclaimed that "Komodo Edit is hands down the best free XML editor available." That's pretty cool, considering XML editing is one area we don't heavily talk about. There are a lot of features that slide under the radar when you don't dig a little deeper. One is that we support RelaxNG schema's and DTD files for adding autocompletion of XML dialects we don't support out-of-box.

But that is all small news. The big news is that Komodo 5 is close to ready! We entered the beta stage a while ago and the dev team is working full steam to flesh out any last minute issues. I am excited about Komodo 5, there are some great new features in there, but you're going to be hearing a lot about Komodo 5 over the coming days and weeks, so I'll keep it short.

Along with Komodo 5 comes a new product lead, Trent Mick. I am stepping out of Komodo work to focus on new initiatives at ActiveState. I'll still help the guys out from time to time if they beg nicely, or give me shiny objects.

Bonjour!

mixedpuppy — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 04:32:59 +0000

Every now and again I spend a weekend day working needlessly on something I shouldn’t. Today that was the SD Connector. SD Connector (released under MPL/GPL/LGPL) is an extension that works in Komodo and Firefox, providing a way to write simple socket services, both server side and client side. The sample services include an echo server, a simple JavaScript shell (accessible via telnet) and a JSON rpc server. They are in varying states of readiness, largely in alpha state.

Today I updated the extension for gecko 1.9, and added a fun new thing, bonjour support! Of course, if you don’t have Python, you don’t get Bonjour! The neat thing is that services provided through SD Connector can now be browsed through Bonjour, and the client side can discover the services with that also. If you’re up for Hacking with Komodo, check it out.

My hope is that some day, the pybonjour module can be replaced with a JavaScript version using the JavaScript ctypes library. That would allow the bonjour services to be used from Firefox as well as other non-pyxpcom based Mozilla applications. If someone hacks one together, let me know.

Mozilla file icon magic

mixedpuppy — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 22:03:31 +0000

Every now and then I find some piece of code in the Mozilla code base that makes me go WTF? Today, I found out about the moz-icon scheme. Try this URL in Firefox:

moz-icon://.js?size=128

Of course it’s no secret, other than not being documented, but I found an interesting use via css. Sometimes I’m the last one to know about something.

Komodo 4.4 and a Kitchen Sink

mixedpuppy — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:47:05 +0000

Komodo 4.4 is out today! Komodo does amazing things, practically a kitchen sink of tools, but hopefully a whole lot more portable. There’s a number of improvements, but my favorite is the new SCC commit dialog and the Change list panel. We did a recent survey and found that 65% of visitors to ActiveState.com feel that having a single tool they can do most of their work in is either critical (20%) or very important (45%). I used to switch to a shell to handle multi file commits, now I can do it in Komodo, nice! I guess I fit somewhere in that 45%.

In other news, I’ll be participating in FOSSCoach at OSCON, very likely at the Utah Open Source Conference, and then AjaxWorld in San Jose. That reminds me I need to submit a talk for FSOSS. I recently returned from eLiberatica in Romania, possibly one of the better conferences I’ve been to in a while (not only because it was in Romania), but FSOSS is still a bit above (certainly less travel time). eLiberatica focused much more on the business side of Open Source, probably why I found it so interesting, I certainly learned some new things from a European perspective. And yes, we did visit Dracula’s castle.

Onwards to Romania

mixedpuppy — Mon, 26 May 2008 16:41:35 +0000

Soon I’ll be flying away to Romania and eLiberatica to introduce Romanians to another creature with teeth, Komodo! It looks to be a very interesting conference, focusing on the benefits and business models behind open source software. I’ll be talking a short bit about why ActiveState open sourced Komodo, what we’ve learned in the process and more. Should be fun!

Ok, so perhaps Dracula has a bit more class than a drooling Komodo…

jssh replacement? SD Connector

mixedpuppy — Sun, 25 May 2008 20:05:22 +0000

Quite a long time ago I made much ado about Snapdragon, a project to integrate Firefox development tools (e.g.Firebug) with Komodo (or other editors/IDEs). Unfortunately sometimes you bite off more than you can chew (the day is only 24 hours), but in the long term I still want to accomplish some integration. There are a lot of cool dev tools and capabilities that area available for Firefox, I’d like to be able to use them through my favorite development environment.

One of the primary elements in this kind of integration is the ability to communicate between processes in a simple way. Back in April, we had a little get together of developers that work on various Mozilla applications and projects, and I mentioned working on a json-rpc implementation that could allow Mozilla applications to do just this. Well, a couple weeks ago I got some working code together in our Open Komodo repository.

One of the eventual goals I’d like to get around to is adding a DBGP layer into Firebug, as well as adding other integration points. So I started out working on a generic socket server layer that I could build services on top of. My first service was a simple echo server.

While digging around for examples, I re-discovered jssh. I noticed a number of blog entries where people were having issues getting or building jssh (since there is no pre built extension). SD Connector is entirely in JavaScript, no compiling necessary. I thought a jssh replacement would be a good test case as well, so I added a JavaScript shell service. It works much like jssh, though it is incomplete from the perspective that it doesn’t implement the global functions that are special to jssh. I think this service would be a good replacement for use with projects like FireWaitr.

The other service I got implemented is a socket based, full duplex, json-rpc service. I’ve only done the most bare-bone testing on this, but it seems to do the job. A simple macro script in Komodo can popup an alert in Firefox, or do other more tasty things. The nice thing about using json-rpc for the protocol, you can integrate non-Mozilla applications as well.

SD Connector is still early in development, there is plenty I’d like to do with it (e.g. make the server an xpcom service, sandboxing json calls, making the config UI better), but I think it’s at a place where people can play with it, or even contribute! You can grab SD Connector out of our repository if you want to take it for a spin.

Success is…

mixedpuppy — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:58:44 +0000

So often in life, defining success is difficult. Is it 10 times ROI? Is it a shiny new bank account after an acquisition or IPO? (No, ActiveState is not at that stage, I’m just dreaming of my own Central American island.) Well, those are nice when they happen, but not as personally fulfilling as seeing users excited enough about the software you write that they make the effort to tell others, or contribute something to it. We’ve always had some level of that happening around Komodo, but in the last year it has really begun to take off. There are more and more people making those contributions, and that is awesome. Here’s a blog entry where the user has gone to the extent to do a lengthy screencast introducing the features of Komodo Edit, and one of our contributors just released a side-by-side diff extension. I find I like thinking of success as having lots of interested and engaged users.

Another day, another baby dragon born

mixedpuppy — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:38:55 +0000

I’m always happy to announce the birth of a new version of Komodo! 4.4 Alpha 1 is up on our download servers. You can find out the details on our community site and see my announcement in the forums. There are some really nice enhancements for IDE, and we’re focusing now on lots of smaller enhancements and fixes for both Edit and IDE.

Open Komodo at LinuxFest

mixedpuppy — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:09:25 +0000

This morning I gave a talk on Open Komodo at LinuxFest in Bellingham, WA. I’ll be around LinuxFest all day, either at our table or in room Haskel-219 where Ericn Promislow is giving a couple talks also. If you’re visting LinuxFest, drop by and say hello! My slides are attached below.

Download linuxfest2008.pdf