We wanted the Evergreen staff client for PINES to be built on a platform that was powerful, cross-platform, standards compliant, and suited for RAD. To this end, we settled on the Mozilla framework. Some applications that use this platform include: Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird. We test the staff client on Firefox, Mozilla, and XUL Runner. Starting with our Alpha release, we have been bundling the staff client with XUL Runner as a single executable installation file.

Application development with Mozilla makes use of XUL, CSS, RDF, XPCOM, and Javascript. The capsule summary is that it allows for a very layered approach where presentation, content, and behavior can be highly separated.

Some resources for development with the mozilla platform: XULPlanet http://mozdev.org/ http://www.mozilla.org/developer/