Two of the [...]]]> I made a trip to MozCamp organized by Shane Caraveo at ActiveState.  It was a meetup designed to bring together XUL developers from the surrounding Victoria / Vancouver area.  There was a decent response with about 20+ people representing various companies with notables such as Mozilla Messaging, Sxipper, Songbird, Activestate (obviously), and Flock.

Two of the main topics people seemed to gravitate towards was build systems and collaboration between companies developing open source software.  These topics will most likely shape a more structured discussion for the next MozCamp, hopefully <biased opinion here/> the next one will be in Victoria.

As for the collaboration, this is a great step forward for those using Xulrunner as their platform base.  Activestate has a number of patches against Xulrunner which haven’t yet landed on the tree.  I ran into some build issues myself when I wanted to build Python scripting natively into Xulrunner.  I searched around and eventually found a fix sitting at Activestate (thanks guys!).

So, as a result of all this independent development on Xulrunner others may be duplicating work, or worse yet missing out on some key bugfixes.  Anybody developing Xulrunner based applications should get together and pool their bugs against Xulrunner so that it can help increase the priority of the bugs.  The more people running into the issue, the more likely it will be looked at and eventually pushed through .

An important side note: As a direct result of going to MozCamp and talking to the ActiveState people, Komodo Edit has now become my editor of choice.  All Mozilla platform developers should be using this!  I’ll report more on this as I become more familiar with the product.  A big thanks to Shane for organizing this event, it was successful and I can’t wait for the next one.