Mozilla, XUL and...Python?

[Dan L. Pierson]

Tim Churches <tchur at bigpond.com> wrote:

> The whole architecture of the Mozilla browser is very impressive,
> especially the ability to create applications using an XML-based
> specification (XUL). The only wrinkle is that the only client-side
> scripting language mentioned is JavaScript. Clearly support for
> JavaScript is essential, but is it possible for other scripting
> langauges, in particular Python, to be embedded in Mozilla? 

This is all from my (mis)understanding of messages on the Zope lists,
so take a grain of salt with it :-)

The bad news: It is evidently very difficult to change Mozilla to use
a langauge other than Javascript as its scripting language.  They'd
like to fix this, but it isn't going to happen soon.

The good news: Mozilla is built around a COM copy called XPCOM.  David
Ascher's work will let you write XPCOM objects in Python (or Perl) and
use XPCOM objects from Python (or Perl).  This means that you could do
almost everything in Python plus a thin Javascript glue layer.

Dan Pierson, Control Technology Corporation
dan at control.com