Where Everybody's Crazy

So I got another well-timed prod about Songbee recently, and picked it up where I left off - which was a problem shipping a nicely cut-down version of Mozilla which did everything that I wanted.

Gervase suggested I take a look at XULRunner, which as its name suggests, is good for running XUL applications. But I don't have an XUL application, I have a web-based application; and XULRunner doesn't like creating pop-up windows for web-based applications due to the Mozilla security policy. Other than that, XULRunner is indeed very nice and exactly what I want.

So I thought about it, and realised that juggling around with a Perl server sending web pages to an XUL application wasn't going to work. And, you know, the Perl code would be really nasty to distribute anyway, since you'd have to use PAR and it all gets complicated. There's another solution: rewrite the whole thing to be an XUL application. Heck, there isn't that much that the Perl server does, anyway; most of the doing-things code is Javascript. Perl's only there to handle the database access, really, and with mozStorage you can do all that in Javascript.

It's going to take a while, but it's going to solve all the technical problems and it's going to be a lot neater and a lot easier to distribute. There's nothing at this stage I don't know how to do.

There have been two major hurdles so far, both of which I've cleared. The first was just learning to think in XUL and Javascript, and get my head around what a completely JS-driven application would look like. The second was getting the database access sorted out. At this point I have the makings of a Class::DBI-style interface to my database, but in Javascript. Class::DBI in Javascript, man, think of it!

I honestly didn't know you could do that.