pyXPCOM does sound attractive but I recommend that you tread a little
carefully at first as I have just evaluated XULRunner + pyXPCOM for a
Mozilla funded accessibility project and decided against using it due
to the number of problems that I experienced. You could spend a little
time exploring the territory. I've decided to go to LSR as a platform
as that's a closer match to my a11y needs. Hooking into XUL would
still be great but that's now a long term idea.

The synopsis is that XULRunner is rather 'off piste' for the Mozilla
community and pyXPCOM even more so. As a result support and
development is minimal. It may be there in the build but that's not
the same as well supported. I spent a lot of time with broken builds
and fixing problems rather than progressing with my project. Also I
never got pyXPCOM working outside of XULRunner context as the docs
suggest you can. Finally there is not yet a complete development
environment for XUL + Python.

To be less negative, XULRunner was only meeting some of the
requirements I had, whereas for you a browser is central and that is
the focus of the moz community. Some of problems I experienced came
from other areas (eg XBL + SVG).  Mozilla are planning to support
XULRunner as a platform but that is a way off and pyXPCOM may not be
part of that.

You may well get better mileage that I did, and it sounds like Edward
is. For one thing I didn't get involved much in the community (now
seen as a mistake). For XULRunner + Python that seems pretty hard to
do. I get the impression Mark Hammond is the main developer but he is
hard to contact (busy man). The pyxpcom IRC is virtually empty. I
couldn't find many projects using pyXPCOM either, mainly Komodo,
though XULRunner itself is very popular for web media applications.
Also you may be willing to spend more time on the techy tinkering need
to get things running smoothly and stay that way. I may have just
missed some of the tools and techniques I needed to make life a little
easier.

Anyway there's a summary of my experience on
http://eduspaces.net/stevelee/weblog/165980.html

a summary of some of the possible improvements to XUL as a dev env
http://eduspaces.net/stevelee/weblog/159484.html

a technology sampler at
http://fullmeasure.co.uk/mozilla/jambu/

and a page on getting a build going at
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Building_XULRunner_with_Python

Perhaps one of those would be of some use to you?

Good luck

-- 
Steve Lee
www.fullmeasure.co.uk
www.oatsoft.org
www.schoolforge.org.uk


On 5/6/07, edward baafi <edwardbaafi@[...].com>  wrote:
>  Hi Ian,
> 
>  This is interesting.. I use PyXpcom along with Xulrunner and currently
>  have a B2 XO for development..
> 
>  In terms of a stripped down Firefox vs. PyXPCOM, I don't see why this
>  would be an either/or as Firefox can be built with PyXPCOM support..
>  Of course you need a stripped down browser in terms of memory
>  footprint (the B2 only has 128MB of ram and the production version
>  should have 256) and you need to add extra functionality and tie it in
>  as a "Sugar Activity" so you should of course use python..
> 
>  So you can build a stripped down Firefox with PyXpcom support and add
>  features and tie into sugar with python, or you can build a Xulrunner
>  based browser from scratch with PyXpcom support.. Actually these
>  aren't too different as Firefox 3 was supposed to just be an app
>  running on top of Xulrunner although this feature shows up as "At
>  Risk" in the Firefox3 features list:
>  http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/Product_Requirements_Document#Gecko.2FPlatform
> 
>  Given that there isn't much to the current "Web Browser Activity" on
>  the XO, I would think that you could build a Xulrunner based version
>  of that pretty quickly and then add features as needed (using PyXpcom
>  if you like) rather than starting with all the features of Firefox and
>  figuring out where to nip and tuck..  I like the Xulrunner plus
>  PyXpcom approach as it would allow others to write Xul apps rather
>  than use py/GTK which is probably too low level for many "Activity"
>  developers..
> 
>  -Ed
> 
> 
>  On 5/6/07, Ian Bicking <ianb@[...].com> wrote:
>  > Hi guys.  We've been thinking about what the browser and ebook reader
>  > experience for the XO/OLPC laptop should be.  We'd like to build this on
>  > the browser, but currently we're just using pygtkmozembed, which doesn't
>  > offer much potential for customization.  So we're thinking about how we
>  > can make a more extensible browser.  Just as an example of the sort of
>  > thing we'd like to do, we'd like to make it so that when you page down
>  > and you are already at the bottom of the page, if the page has a <link
>  > rel="next"> link, we'd use that.
>  >
>  > PyXPCOM seems like a good basis for this sort of work.  It uses Python,
>  > we use Python, it offers access to the internals of the document, and we
>  > want that too.  But from what I can tell not that many people use
>  > PyXPCOM.  Actually, I have no idea who uses it at all.  Obviously this
>  > is worrying.
>  >
>  > So I'm wondering, given OLPC's somewhat constrained schedule and the
>  > importance of the browser to the laptop experience, is PyXPCOM something
>  > we should pursue?  We have to do something different than what we are
>  > doing now, but the other alternative is to do something more
>  > conservative like Firefox (either stripping it down, or building up
>  > something similar).
>  >
>  >    Ian
>  > _______________________________________________
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>  >
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-- 
Steve Lee
www.fullmeasure.co.uk
www.oatsoft.org
www.schoolforge.org.uk
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