blag/post/xulrunner-rocks-.mdwn

   1 [[!meta title="XULRunner rocks!"]]
   2 [[!meta date="2011-03-15 22:16"]]
   3 [[!meta author="rohieb"]]
   4 [[!meta license="CC-BY-SA 3.0"]]
   5
   6 For [[one of my projects|projects/infopoint-html]], I needed an
   7 application to display a web page in full screen mode. At first, I used
   8 Firefox with the [AutoHide extension][0], but this solution was more of
   9 a hack and not easy to deploy to multiple machines — I worked with a
  10 pre-configured user profile that was copied every time the application
  11 started. Furthermore, after each update, Firefox would check for
  12 compatibility of installed plugins and displayed a nasty dialog in the
  13 meantime.
  14
  15 So I tried to move away from Firefox and do something on my own,
  16 something slim which did just what I wanted, nothing more, and do it
  17 good — according to the [UNIX philosophy][1]. But writing another
  18 C/C++/Python/whatever application from scratch was not an option
  19 (implementing an HTML renderer would be a pain, and I didn’t fancy
  20 reading extensive manuals about WebKit, Gecko or any other rendering
  21 engine).
  22
  23 After a while of thinking, which included thought fragments of
  24 [Songbird][2] and [Conkeror][3], I decided to give [XULrunner][4] a shot
  25 (for those who do not know, XUL is the XML-based user interface language
  26 used by the Mozilla applications and the Firefox and Thunderbird
  27 extensions, and XULRunner is an interpreter and run-time environment for
  28 XUL documents).
  29
  30 So after a while of hacking (there is a good [tutorial on the Mozilla
  31 Developer Network][5]), I ended up with a few lines of code:
  32
  33 [[!format xml """
  34 <?xml version="1.0"?>
  35 <?xml-stylesheet href="chrome://global/skin/" type="text/css"?>
  36 <?xml-stylesheet href="main.css" type="text/css"?>
  37 <window
  38   xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"
  39   id="viewer" windowtype="viewer" title="Infopoint HTML View"
  40   hidechrome="true">
  41
  42   <hbox flex="1">
  43   <iframe id="contentview" flex="1"
  44     src="chrome://infopointhtmlviewer/content/default.html" />
  45   </hbox>
  46   <script>
  47     // load URI given on command line
  48     var content = document.getElementById("contentview");
  49     var cmdLine = window.arguments[0].QueryInterface(
  50       Components.interfaces.nsICommandLine);
  51     var uri = content.getAttribute("src");
  52     alert("Default URL: " + uri);
  53     if(cmdLine.length > 0) {
  54       uri = cmdLine.getArgument(0);
  55     }
  56
  57     if(content != null) {
  58       content.setAttribute("src", uri);
  59     }
  60
  61     // resize to full screen
  62     window.resizeTo(screen.width, screen.height);
  63   </script>
  64 </window>
  65 """]]
  66
  67 The above code is in the public domain.
  68
  69 And that was basically everything. I was surprised that there was
  70 nothing more to it.
  71
  72 You can get the source code of the full application [on GitHub][6].
  73
  74 [0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20120415204503/http://www.krickelkrackel.de/autohide/autohide.htm
  75 [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
  76 [2]: http://getsongbird.com/
  77 [3]: http://conkeror.org/
  78 [4]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XULRunner
  79 [5]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Getting_started_with_XULRunner
  80 [6]: https://github.com/rohieb/infopoint-html
  81
  82 [[!tag programming GitHub JavaScript Mozilla Mozilla_Firefox XUL
  83     XULRunner]]