Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

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What the Zope/Mozilla Initiative Means

Author:	Eric Kidd
Posted:	12/10/1999; 12:10:46 PM
Topic:	Today's scriptingNews Outline
Msg #:	13539 (In response to 13530)
Prev/Next:	13538 / 13540

I noticed an interesting news tidbit today:

Zope.Org: The Zope/Mozilla Initiative. "Zope's management environment pays for the flexibility of an 'Internet architecture' by being less productive than competitive 'thick-client' environments." Hmmm. Refreshingly honest! (We like thick clients, but we like thin ones too.)

Right now, Mozilla is nearing an alpha release. The browser core is clean, speedy (except for the bogus reflow problem) and starting to stabilize. We should see a useable alpha within a few months, and a beta a while after that. Netscape still doesn't know how to write large applications, but they're making slow progress anyway.

Mozilla already implements tons of W3 standards. Imagine those broadband DHTML apps, and you'll get the idea. Mozilla has client-side scripting, GUI widgets and the ability to munge XML. The Mozilla HTML editor, for example, is essentially a large Javascript application, as is the newsreader. What this means: If Netscape ever releases Mozilla, you should finally be able to write portable applications that run in a browser. There's even an improved text-editing widget.

Zope's front-end is heavily web-based. It uses frames, forms and lots of tags. This has both upsides and downsides. The upside: You can build Zope sites from anywhere. The downside: The GUI is clunky at best. To solve these problems, Digital Creations is apparently building a custom client that runs inside Mozilla.<p> On a related note: Internet Explorer users may not miss the fun. Various Mozilla groups have created a version of Mozilla's HTML engine which can run invisibly as an ActiveX component inside IE. Talk about swallowing your pride to help developers.<p> Of course, all this is moot if Mozilla never ships. It's looking a lot better than it was six months ago (and it's more stable than Netscape 4.7 for some users), but it's cleary not a release candidate yet.<p> Cheers,<br> Eric <br><br><hr><b>There are responses to this message:</b><ul><li> <a href="msg013552.html">Re: What the Zope/Mozilla Initiative Means</a>, Andrew Wooldridge, 12/10/1999; 4:36:21 PM<p></ul> <br><br><hr>This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:42 PM.<br><br>© Copyright 1998-2001 <a href="http://www.userland.com/">UserLand Software</a>, Inc. </blockquote></blockquote> </body> </html>