Mozpad API Project Sample

This is how the results are gathered when the script is ran. The following are screen shots of GTK and Windows.

GTK



WINDOWS

Mozpad API Project - 0.1 Release

Its been a couple of weeks and for me, its been difficult. I have been trying to persue people in the community to run the script created by Matt and I got only a few to run out of many. I am still new to the community as my connection to other people are limited but with the help of Dave and Matt the project is slowly getting there. Matt told me he had a number of people he knew that might be able to run the script and from the results it looks like he got plenty of help. These results were created by running a script created by Jakub (Matt's acquaintances) so it can be easily read and analyzed. For now, this is what i have to report for the 0.1 release and to mention that this project is do-able and very fascinating.

Modifying the Browser Lab

WOW! Is this hard or what?! I went to Mozilla Cross Reference - SeaMonkey tool to search for how newtabs work and too many results came up. I refined my search to only results that deals with browsers as that was one advice i remember hearing about and I am still currently trying to find the root of this newtab function. This lab sure is technical!

Project Update

Its been a tough week as I am trying to get people in the community to run the script. I got one person to run it and emailed me the results. Matt is also trying to get a hold of some people he knows. As of now, I am STILL trying to find more people. Hope it works out at the end.

Current open source project

I am currently working on a project called "Improve Mozilla Application and Platform Documentation" with Matthew Gertner and Eric Sheppard from Mozilla. This project purpose is to "find out which APIs are being used and how, what is hard, what could be improved, etc." Currently, Matt has created a script that retrieves various results that can be used as valuable information for this project where I am trying to get a hold of people in big Mozilla project to run it. For more information, follow the link below.

http://www.allpeers.com/blog/2007/09/28/mozpad-api-project-update/

Real World Mozilla Source Code Reading Lab

I got my first hand experience on searching and reading Mozilla code using the mozilla cross reference website with the tool - sea monkey. I find this application to be very useful in finding ANY type of source code or functions that is available. My first attempt was to research how the Stop button for a browser would work. As a first timer, I trailed off and found the cancel button to stop file downloads. I thought it was the same concept using the same class but it actually wasn't as Dave (professor) told me. I continued to search for the correct one but it is harder then i thought it would be. You have to dig through a lot of code to find the source!

Building Firefox

WOW! I finally finish building Firefox. It took a little bit over 90 minutes on my laptop. My laptop is quite old (Pentium M 1.5Ghz, 512 ram). At first, i read over the instructions on how to build but i ended up encountering some errors. I re-read the instructions and i seem to have miss a key line... which was

mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser

ac_add_options --enable-application=browser

which is needed. I thought it wasn't necessary so i spent some time figuring things out. My overall experience of building Firefox is pretty exciting as i have never build anything this BIG before. There are so much source code and files to process, i don't even know where to start reading. I am surely going to look at this browser in more detail down the road.