In this series of articles I will be looking at why RIA developers should be interested in Mozilla. This is an important topic, especially if you're one of those wise and pragmatic developers who likes to pick the right tool for the job, which we all are right? Learning about the breadth of the technologies that Mozilla's projects cover can potentially save you a lot of work for your next project!

In this first part we will look at why Mozilla is often not considered an RIA citizen. We'll also take a step back and see who Mozilla is, and what makes them unique. And we'll begin to look at what technologies they have that fall under that controversial category of "Rich Internet Application".

Mozilla and RIA, like Apples and Oranges?

When RIA platforms and companies are discussed, plug-in technologies are brought up right away. Companies and platforms like Adobe, Flash Player, Microsoft, and Silverlight dominate the conversation. We also hear about Ajax, and lately JavaFX.

In these discussions Mozilla rarely comes up. Thats changing a bit now thanks to the help of the Mozilla Lab's project Prism. However, Mozilla is often strictly associated with Firefox and viewed as just another browser vendor. This is to be expected, as they only really have two products, the more popular being a web browser.

After all, if you're developing an RIA for cross-browser compatibility, Firefox is often just another browser in your test matrix. Creating a beefy Firefox version of your application and gracefully degrading in others is an option, and sometimes very worthwhile. But testing for cross-browser compatibility is often more than enough work!

Mozilla technology expands beyond the Firefox product boundaries though. Before we get into the bytes, lets first look at the people.

Mozilla - The People

You can't talk about Mozilla without talking about the people. And I'm not talking about just employees of Mozilla, but also the community. There are many people doing awesome work that care 110% about what they do, and do it with passion. I've benefited a great deal from the work of a number of people, either through their blogs, documentation efforts, or repository commits. These include people like Neal Deakin, Benjamin Smedberg, Mark Finkle, Darin Fisher, Alex Vincent, Brendan Eich, and Dietrich Ayala.

Enough name-dropping though, really it's the entire community of contributors and developers that make the many projects at Mozilla possible.

What Makes Mozilla Unique? MoCo, MoFo, MoWhat!?

What is Mozilla exactly? Mozilla is made up of two different parts: a corporation and a foundation. I won't get into too much detail on the differences, but instead briefly describe how I separate them out in my head.

The Mozilla Corporation is responsible for stewarding Mozilla products (which right now consists of Firefox and Thunderbird), and handling the details of any revenue generated by the products.

The Mozilla Foundation is actually the non-profit organization that leads and coordinates all of the many open source projects that make up Mozilla and that power the two products.

These two are by no means independent of each other, rather they work together. This relationship and the many activities of the Mozilla Foundation make this a very unique organization.

From Mozilla:

"Mozilla is not a traditional software company. We are a global community and public benefit organization dedicated to improving the Internet experience for people everywhere ... We work in the open through a highly disciplined, transparent and cooperative process to coordinate the development and marketing of Mozilla technologies and products"

The grass roots, open source culture of Mozilla really brings a needed balance to a field comprised of commercial organizations with proprietary technologies.

Mozilla Projects

I mentioned already that Mozilla really only has two products, Firefox and Thunderbird. However, they have many projects going on as well. What are some of these projects that might be of interest to us RIA developers? Two of these are XULRunner and Prism.

XULRunner is a runtime package that enables development of internet-enabled desktop applications using XML and web technologies. Sound familiar?

Prism is meant to expose existing web applications to basic desktop functionality. Prism is actually built on XULRunner.

These two brief descriptions show some important differentiations between the two projects.

Why Should I Be Interested?

To sum up, Mozilla is a unique player in the RIA field resulting from the people, technology, and organizational structure. They offer a number of technologies that can provide solutions to some hard problems we encounter developing rich internet applications.

As a bonus, whether we are coming from an HTML, Ajax, or Flex background, we can reuse existing knowledge and techniques. In the second part of this series we'll look at some of the runtimes and technologies available to RIA developers that Mozilla has to offer.