After a few months of quiet (following the not ready for primetime Netscape 6.0 preview release) the Mozilla project is again picking up steam. First up, it look like Activestate will be bringing Perl and Python into the Mozilla development environment. Says ActiveState project leader Dr. David Ascher, "By providing bridges between Perl and Python and the Mozilla framework, we are giving the Perl and Python Open Source projects deep access to the power of Mozilla." Becasue remember, it's not just a browser. In other news, alphanumerica has written code that will allow javascript inside mozilla easy access to local filesystems. They have based this on the very easy to use PHP filesystem functions. All code has of course been released free to the community. They built this input/output system because they needed the functionality to build their mozilla crash recovery system. With this layer installed in Mozilla, the browser will continuously track the state of all open Mozilla windows, and in the event of a program or system wide crash, will be able to restore the state of all windows on reboot. (!) I wonder how much of a speed hit you take for running this? In any case, very cool, and this could be incredibly important as the web morphs from a page based model to an application based model. Who wants to use a web based application (word processor, spreadsheat, ect...) if you lose all your data everytime your browser crashes?
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- jim 5-25-2000 3:54 pm