If you missed the announcement post, go and read that to get the low-down.

XAPGen is a project to provide tools to help automate the generation of XULRunner projects and packaging for distribution.

I now have a first release using Ant, and have done preliminary testing on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

First, you can generate brand-new XULRunner projects just by passing in an app/project name. Then you will have a project that is ready-to-go to package apps for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Here’s what I used on the various platforms to get started:

• Mac OS X: Xcode Tools and you’re up and running. You can create packages for all three major platforms
• Linux: Java SDK, and Ant. You can create packages for all three major platforms
• Windows: Cygwin, Java SDK, and Ant. You can create packages for Windows and Linux. (The Mac build relies on some UNIX tools not available in Cygwin)

There are also tasks for each platform: buildAndRunMac, buildAndRunWin, buildAndRunLinux. These will build and immediately run your app and open the Error console for debugging.

So this obviously isn’t for the projects building custom XULRunner binaries from the Moz source tree, but rather for devs using XULRunner as-is.

There is a lot of stuff that I would like to do to make this even better. And there are some really cool ways to extend this. Right now I thought I would get a tracer bullet out-the-door first. (One thing I know I want to do soon is optimize the buildAndRun tasks better)

So if you get a chance to play around with this, let me know what you think.

Check out the README file for the details.

Download: XAPGen 0.1a

There sure is a lot of news surrounding this right now.

I’ve been working on this project inspired by Mozpad named XAPGen:

XULRunner Application Project and Package Generator

XAPGen is a project to provide tools to help automate the generation of XULRunner projects and packaging for distribution.

The project does not focus solely on one automation/build technology, but welcomes contributions and techniques using various technologies. This is to help XULRunner application development to be approachable to a wider audience coming from different backgrounds.

I’m really close to releasing an early version for wider testing, but am waiting to get my MacBook Pro back from getting a faulty display replaced to at least do some testing on Windows and Linux. The version I am working on right now uses Apache Ant.

I wanted to get out a heads up about this though before the Mozpad meeting. Here is an example of how simple it is to get started with a XULRunner app with XAPGen Ant:

Generate a project just by passing in an app name:

Package up your new app right away:

You now have packages for Mac, Windows, and Linux: