mcbridematt's Journal: The future of Jazilla

Reports of hackers starting to hack a new Java port of Mozilla came on the 3rd of April 1998. I noted that IBM largely welcomed this. JavaSoft (almost non-existent these days, Java is pretty much marketed by Sun directly) also welcomed it "It is a great thing that they are doing it," said Tucker. "It seems like it might be a good thing for the industry to get a Java version of the browser.".

Two years later, the Jazilla project stalled, and a year after that, jXUL, (which would also stall, but become the base of a new Jazilla base one year later) was released (see here)

I took over the Jazilla project in August 2002 and moved very quickly by hacking the toolbars to look like Phoenix, and then released M2, which was the last ever release of Jazilla-classic/JavaGator.

A month later, I forked jXUL, had a look at it and then later implemented the browser tag. I had a disk crash, and lost it. So I've just created a new implementation which also has JS bindings (It ain't in CVS yet, Rhino appears to be blocking it from running).

Overall, Once the bulk of Jazilla work is completed, Jazilla should have a simular path to Mozilla (without XPFE being mothballed, hey XPFE rulez), with people using it to create cross platform programs, and having a good browser.

Since Jazilla is obviously coded in Java, Jazilla could be used to port XPFE or if you bloddy well prefer, Firebird to a whole lot of platforms which it doesn't run at the moment, only requiring a J2SE interpreter. Heck, if you search google groups far down enough, Al Sutton questioned weather to port NSPR to Java. It never happened, unfortunately :-(

I end on a bad note. I am the only developer working on the Jazilla project at the moment. Yes, there is a massive list of named on the SF names, but I am not allowed to remove them without appropriate authorisation yet. So if you are interested in a Java port of Mozilla should start hackin'