So... XEDE... what am I on about?
Well, for a long time I've been intrested in the Mozilla Application Framework and for a long time I've been thinking about doing quite a large, scary project. The basic idea of it all, is to have a window manager where one can implement all the functionality and User Interface using XUL and scriptable languages. So why the hell would someone want to do this? Well... XUL is an XML based User Interface format that works just like any other rendered stuff on the gecko rendering engine. This means that everything you touch within firefox or the mozilla suite is rendered from files that you can edit with any text editor without compiling. So... Javascript/CSS/XUL/XBL are all very quick and easy, making mozilla a very rapid framework for development.
But I'm talking about X11 protocol... that's all very complex and there's no way that the mozilla developers have ever thought about that. Well, it doesn't matter; Mozilla relies on a technology called XPCOM to provide functionality from other components. So this means that if I have a C++ library for doing X11 window management style things, I can use XPCOM in connection with XPConnect to call all that C++ code from Javascript (funky, eh?).
So why am I talking about this? Well... I've been doing a lot of research on this for several months and started on the X11 code (even though it drove me up the wall). Since then, my laptop was nicked (along with all the code... argh), Xorg has come into existence and I've been given a huge grounding in Javascript 1.5 techniques along with user interface design. Unfortunately, C++ is not my forte and neither is X11, and it's incredably detremental on ones confidence to keep bumping into issues which you're rather out of depth on. So, I need help... even just someone to bounce stuff off in relation to C++ code and X11. If you can help out, please let me know and e-mail me at scott -at- kungfuftr -dot- com
thanks!
