Interesting stuff: Dasher, Bumptop, OceanStore, XqUSEme
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Dasher:
Dasher is an information-efficient text-entry interface, driven by natural continuous pointing gestures. Dasher is a competitive text-entry system wherever a full-size keyboard cannot be used[…]
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Bumptop:
BumpTop is a fresh and engaging new way to interact with your computer desktop. You can pile and toss documents like on a real desk. Break free from the rigid and mechanical style of standard point-and-click desktops. Interact by pushing, pulling and piling documents with elegant, self revealing gestures. BumpTop’s stunning interface makes clever use of 3D presentation and smooth physics-based animations for an engaging, vivid user experience.
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OceanStore:
OceanStore is a global persistent data store designed to scale to billions of users. It provides a consistent, highly-available, and durable storage utility atop an infrastructure comprised of untrusted servers.
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XqUSEme:
XqUSEme is written to allow XQueries in Firefox via the open-source Saxon-B XQuery engine, or, with an extra download, via the Berkeley DB XML native XML database. The latter can also allow storage of XML documents but it is about 52 MB to download, and about 400+ MB after installation.
February 6th, 2008 at 6:55 am
Hi there,
Sorry for the delayed response to your question at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391642 … No email notification in FF Addons site…
For your convenience, I’m reposting my reply below…
Unfortunately, right now, I don’t think you’d be able to access it from GM. I don’t really know about the level of sandboxing between Firefox extensions, but I would guess they can’t easily call each other.
It would be possible to modify GM to run the XQueries, but that would be several MBs of extra code for GM, though I think there is a way to express dependencies, so e.g. a version of GM might specify that it depends on XqUseMe, etc.
Comment by Brett Zamir made February 6, 2008, 04:53 AM
Edit Comment
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What I really should do is make an XPCOM component which exposes the API for other extensions, and I presume there are some means of component reuse/dependencies/etc., though on this, I also have little knowledge now. Another challenge is that, LiveConnect, which normally allows one to make Java calls from within JS (the XQuery engines I’m using use Java), is buggy in FF, and it seems the developers don’t want to fix it. The only way I got the extension to work is by writing a wrapper class, and that required some extra work in writing the Java code, since I have to make the classes throw exceptions and send these back to JS, since try-catch in LiveConnect (i.e., within JS) isn’t working (and so one exception as from a bad query–could force the user to need to restart FF if I weren’t doing this). So, this makes it a bit more time-consuming to write a good API, even though I agree that would be very nice (though I hadn’t thought of GM before–nice idea). I hope the devs fix the LiveConnect bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391642 (consider a vote if you agree!)
Oh, if you were thinking of trying LiveConnect yourself to access Saxon-B, BDBXML, etc. you need something in the extension (which I got from the Java Firefox Extension) which also gives Java the necessary privs.
February 6th, 2008 at 6:57 am
Oh… and if you’re so inclined, it’d help for me to know if one can use privileged JS and/or XPCOM calls in GM…Thx…
February 6th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Brett, thanks for finding me and engaging me!
I’ve just created a Bugzilla account, specifically to vote for the bug that you linked above. I’m afraid that it won’t have much of an effect (given the newness of my Bugzilla account, the lack of comments and votes for other bugs, etc.), but you’ve got my wholehearted support. I think that having XQuery support in Firefox would be outrageously great.