The Mozilla project was started in March 1998 with the goal of developing the successor to Netscape's Communicator 4.x browser suite. Today Mozilla is used by developers as a platform for creating applications that can be installed locally or run remotely over the Internet.
The difference between the Mozilla project's original goal of creating a browser suite and its current use as a cross-platform development framework is not as strange as it may sound at first. A web browser might not seem like an application development framework, but it is. Browsers allow people using any type of computer to access applications such as Yahoo! Mail to send and receive email, Amazon's book ordering service, or eBay's online auction house.
Mozilla has expanded the idea of using a browser to access applications by building on some of the technologies that are used to create web sites, such as CSS and JavaScript. A comparison of web technologies to Mozilla technologies is presented in this chapter and is helpful in explaining how the Mozilla project has turned into a platform for creating cross-platform applications.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment