WebRunner:Planning

WebRunner Spec Ideas

Features that WebRunner could support. Listed from most basic to most advanced.

1. Use Firefox 3 as the runtime for the WebRunner application
2. Open a bookmarked webapp in a chromeless window (separate process) from a Firefox menu
   1. Chromeless window should remember size and position for each webapp between sessions
3. Install a webapp to the local machine as a launch-able, dock-able, shortcut-able, ALT-TAB-able application
   1. Favicon used as icon
   2. Special stub launcher that warns if Firefox was installed, since Firefox will be the runtime
4. Enable WebRunner to support regular extensions
   1. Some extensions would extend the chromeless window
   2. Some extensions would extend the webapp (google gears)
5. Allow some tweaking / scripting of the chromeless window (basic to advanced)
   1. Add popup alerts (notification of new mail or meetings in gmail, gcalendar or zimbra)
   2. Allow addition of webapp specific toolbars and menus to the chromeless window
   3. Allow webapp mashups (meboo / gtalk could be a sidebar in zoho / google apps)
   4. Add drag-n-drop support (files to google docs or images to flickr)
   5. Add content handling (register file types with OS so user can double click files to open them in a webapp)
   6. Allow simple file / DB access - sandboxed to a specific folder in the user's profile

Discussion

mfinkle: I think (#1 - #3.1) is the minimum basic feature set. However, I think a basic feature set is not rich enough. People are expecting (and asking for) a feature set closer to Adobe AIR which is (#1 - #5.6). Keep in mind that #4 is a freebie since its builtin into XULRunner and #5 is a minimalist API exposed to a greasmonkey-like, sandboxed JS script. We don't need to create all the uses, just the API to enable them. Personally, I'd like to see WebRunner with a feature set somewhere like (#1 - #5.3), although the file handling features (#5.4 & #5.5) would be killer features.

20after4: I would be willing to help implement File handling! I have been writing an XUL App that manages photo galleries. I already have working code to handle dropped images on both the application window and on OS X it handles files dropped on the application's dock icon. I will go to work integrating that into an extension for webrunner. I think that webrunner has enough flexibility that I can now stop writing custom XUL Applications and instead concentrate on .webapp packages and extensions for webrunner.

Bosky101: could webrunner have an inbuilt class library with decent system access documentation. or the ability for webrunner to plug'n'play with js libraries like jquery /dojo that would be great. in particular ,in extending the vector and graphic capabilites like for svg,effects and so on. The reason i point this out is that if you check out adobe flex, the reason they can take it offline,online with such ease and give such a rich nature is because of a bunch of classes theyve built. infact when coding in flex, these classes are not even closed - it's just there ,coded up nicely and available. i think webrunner needs an inbuilt bunch of js classes OR atleast the ability to plug-in js libraries which can then be accessed specifically for webrunner apps.