This is the piece I've been putting off a little, mostly because I've been deciding how much to talk about a segment. Gervase Markham kicked off the presentations with a run through of what was new in Bugzilla, which he did with his usual humour and given that mozilla.org was unobtainable from the University site managed to demonstrate a lot of visual changes and charts and what have you mostly by waving his hands in the air.

You can see his presentation on Bugzilla here.

Bugzilla's strength has been the number of flags, properties and whathaveyou that you could categorise a bug with (its also its weakness but that's an argument for a different post), and then reporting on them. Gerv, and others have done a lot of work in generating new charting reports which can be stored per Bugzilla user, but they rely on the data being collected nightly for each query. That's the kind of thing that makes my brain ache just because it feels that it should all be in the database and accessible whenever. But that would require maintaining the state of all those flags and properties and whenever they changed. Which is an entirely different kind of animal.

After Gerv's presentation Hisham El-Emam stepped up to talk about remote applications with Mozilla and as he'd indicated that he was looking for some possible solutions to some security problems I sort of assumed that he'd got so far with his application development and become roadblocked as so many of us have.

He wasn't quite so hampered with the lack of network connection as he ran his server app on the notebook as well, which took an age to load but he seemed fairly sanguine about all that.

He took us through Filemaker, the Windows version, which is the ubiquitous database in the Mac world and he scrawled some data into some table or other. Then he switched to Firefox and loaded his page which had a line of icons across the middle, one was a database connection,he clicked that and an almost exact same replica of the Filmaker UI was in Firefox and had the same table with the same scrawled data. A remote application running inside the Foxfire browser and accessing real data belonging to a desktop app.

He switched away from Firefox and ran Excel, shoved a few numbers into a couple of cells, went back to his web page and clicked on the spreadsheet icon, and there was the Excel spreadsheet with all the cells and buttons and UI of a spreadsheet, not as exact a model of the Excel UI but that is understandable.

Then Hish did the same with Word, and then with Power Point showing his own Power Point presentation within the Firefox browser all sharing the same data.

You might want to read back over those few paragraphs again to take in the implications...

Now, it isn't all of Excel, Word or Powerpoint or Filemaker that's been implemented, or at least emulated but given that any one user is likely to use only 20% of a general purpose application and they're implementing around 40% they stand a reasonable chance of claiming a goodly percentage of all users' 20%.

There is more, much more and a licencing future I don't claim to understand but it seems all will become clear in May or June of this year.

The original posting in the new journal is here