Flickr Uploadr: Open Source and Powered by XULRunner (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog)

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YDN YDN Blog Flickr Uploadr: Open Source and Powered by XULRunner

Yahoo! Developer Network Blog

February 13, 2008

Flickr Uploadr: Open Source and Powered by XULRunner

When version 3.0 of the Flickr Uploadr came out, we Flickr users got a significantly more useful tool for getting photos online. But things changed significantly behind the scenes as well.

First off, the new Flickr Uploadr is built on top of Mozilla technology--XULRunner to be specific. If you haven't heard of XULRunner...

XULRunner is a Mozilla runtime package that can be used to bootstrap XUL+XPCOM applications that are as rich as Firefox and Thunderbird. It will provide mechanisms for installing, upgrading, and uninstalling these applications. XULRunner will also provide libxul, a solution which allows the embedding of Mozilla technologies in other projects and products.

The choice to build on XULRunner is something that I discussed with Richard Crowley in this video for our Experts at Work series on YDN Theater.

Building on top of a Mozilla engine isn't new, of course. ActiveState has been doing so for years now for their Komodo IDE, as ActiveState founder Dick Hardt and I discussed in this interview at the 2007 Defrag Conference. The difference is that the platform is far more mature and feature complete now.

Unlike previous versions of the Uploadr, version 3.0 is available under an Open Source license (the GPL version 2). You can get the source code here if you'd like to poke around and add a feature of your own.

It's a pattern that seems to repeat itself time and time again: Open Source infrastructure maturing and eventually replacing proprietary system.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at February 13, 2008 10:33 AM | Permalink

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Comments

Hi Jeremy, would it be possible to get a zip'ed version of the uploader (instead of an exe-based installer)?

Posted by: jeff at February 13, 2008 7:39 PM

Jeff: The Windows version of Uploadr sets up registry keys for file associations and shortcuts as it installs, which is why it is distributed as an executable.

Posted by: Richard Crowley at February 13, 2008 7:57 PM

Any possibility of getting a Linux version?

Posted by: sam at February 14, 2008 2:34 PM

A Linux version will hopefully come with the next release. For those with strong compiler-fu, download the source and build it yourself.

Posted by: Richard Crowley at February 14, 2008 4:40 PM

Any chance of making this portable? I don't like that it (seems to) saves your account info on the computer you're on, somewhere other than in the program folder (registry, windows hidden directory, etc). Maybe even adding an option to not save account info at all?

Posted by: gary at April 16, 2008 1:18 PM

There is a chance to make it portable:
http://portableapps.com/node/13434

Posted by: n-regen at May 19, 2008 9:17 AM

Excellent work n-regen, thanks so much.

Posted by: gary at June 15, 2008 5:38 PM