MozLab Fires Up Firefox

So how do you make sense of all of these tools and functionalities? A little known (until now) add-on project called MozLab might change the meaning of what it means to interact with a browser. The project is the work of a single developer at this stage.

At its core, MozLab is a shell and framework for Mozilla's browser. The code is based on the XML user interface language (XUL). For those that don't know what XUL is, just open up the Mozilla browser and look around - - Firefox's user interface is implemented in XUL. XUL uses Mozilla's open source Gecko engine for rendering.

The language is primarily used for creating new interfaces or fiddling with user interfaces and JavaScript. Firefox parses XUL like it parses any other script or language. In fact, Firefox uses the same code structures to parse HTML, XUL, DOM, CSS and other Web technologies. In a way, you can think of Microsoft's XAML as the commercial versions of XUL.

The shell tool in MozLab is called MozRepl in Firefox or Repl, for short, when it runs on a shell. With Repl, developers can interrogate user interfaces and test JavaScript functionality in real time. Repl is at version .1 in beta, so expect buggy software. Repl is supposed to work with Telnet, PuTTY and Netcat. In the lab, we were only able to make it work with PuTTY. However, the developer recommends Netcat.

Bugs aside, Repl is going to allow developers to light Firefox up. Right now, the Repl framework can connect and modify some page functionality. The power behind this add-on is that it can be done with little coding. The framework simplifies developer interactions with the Mozilla browser and Web pages. Developers can navigate to sites, change elements on pages, add new functions and test them in real time.

After looking at some the functionality in Repl, it clearly looks like it is going to play an important role in speeding up development.