Mozilla as an Application Virtual Machine
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Extremely Portable
Mozilla is extremely portable; it already runs on Windows, Macintosh, and most flavors of Unix, as well as less well-known operating systems such as BeOS, OS/2 and Mac OS X.
Basically, any viable operating system today either has a version of Mozilla running on it or has a project underway to port Mozilla. Applications written using Mozilla naturally take advantage of this, so they will run on Windows as well as Linux without any modifications to their code. In this sense, Mozilla is acting as an Application Virtual Machine by allowing them to be written once and run anywhere.
An example of Mozilla's flexibility appears in the Script Editor. This gem shows how XPFE can be used to create a new tool out of Mozilla. The Script Editor is a Web-based application created on top of the Mozilla codebase that's designed for editing HTML, JavaScript, PHP, XUL, or potentially any other programming or scripting language.
Although it's just a prototype, the Script Editor already has an advantage over every other similar major application in the market today. Neither FrontPage, Homesite, BBEdit, Dreamweaver, GoLive, or Emacs runs on nearly as many different platforms as the Mozilla-based Script Editor does.
This is just one example of Mozilla's portability. The bottom line is that applications which are built on top of Mozilla's code base are inherently cross-platform from the start.
Why use the Term "VM" to Describe Mozilla?
"Virtual Machine" is borrowed from the philosophy behind the Java technology, a computer language designed to run on any platform that has an operating-system-specific layer, called a Java Virtual Machine, installed on it.
This reference to Java is a reference of semantics, not of technology. The specifics of how Java works are not being emulated by the Mozilla developers, but the similarities do exist between these two technologies in their cross-platform nature.
Of course, by using this terminology there's the potential to have a negative association with Java's perceived inability to deliver what it promised when it was first introduced to the Web. To avoid this problem, it might be beneficial to preserve the idea of an Application Virtual Machine by using some different wording.
So, whatever this powerful tool used to create cross-platform applications ends up being called, clearly Mozilla is more than just Netscape's latest browser. For two years Mozilla has been in the domain of programmers working with mountains of source code. Now that Mozilla and Netscape 6 are gaining notoriety and understanding within the Web community, people are beginning to realize that the results of the past two years could have a far more positive impact on web communications than ever imagined.
David Boswell has been involved in the Mozilla community for more than six years. He is also a coauthor of Creating Applications with Mozilla and helped launch mozdev.org.
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