The next in my series of Euro OSCON interviews is up. I talked with Axel Hecht, a major Mozilla contributor and member of Mozilla Europe's board of directors.

At Euro OSCON Axel will be promoting Mozilla as a development platform. I was interested to ask him about this, as it seems Mozilla has had this promise for a long while (for me personally, over five years--see earlier dabblings of mine) but never come through on it. That seems set to change. Axel explained that the separating out of Thunderbird and Firefox in the application suite has driven the extraction of the platform from the Mozilla application itself.

Tehcnically speaking, the new platform will take the shape of XULRunner, a runtime for the XUL and XPCOM technologies that power Firefox and Thunderbird. The second important development underpinning the emergence of Mozilla as a development platform is the Devmo project, to create comprehensive and up-to-date documentation on the platform.

For more on this, and the answer to questions such as "do I have to use JavaScript?", read the full interview over on O'Reilly Network.