There is an interesting write up over there on InfoQ about Mozilla's XUL:

Jonathan Allen: Last week we ran a short piece on the future of rich client frameworks. At the time we over-looked XUL as a proprietary language for Mozilla add-ons. It seems that was a mistake.

XML User Interface Language (XUL) shares many of the features with the other frameworks we covered last week, including an XML based presentation and JavaScript on the back end. But it also has a few key features that set it apart.

With the focus on tools like Adobe Flex 2 and Adobe Apollo, the elite thinkers are exploring ways to go beyond mere Web applications and bring the rest of the developer world into the Rich Internet Applications era.

I think it is very telling that when InfoQ did a round up of Rich Client Frameworks they forgot about XUL. There is virtually no marketing or promotions behind XUL. It's true people who work on the XUL Explorer are talking about it in a few articles here and there, and from time to time the O'Reilly Network would feature an article that mentions XUL. However the impression I'm getting from the rest of the internet is that nobody cared about XUL. And that's just sad.

For XUL is a truly capably GUI toolkit. If you have any doubts about its capabilities, just think about this—the Firefox browser and Thinderbird email client are themselves XUL applications.

But those are GUI client applications, not web applications, you will point out. True. But with the proper permission and packaging, a XUL application can be delivered over the web. As the Amazon thingy demonstrates.

But that demo only runs inside Mozilla and Firefox but not IE, you will point out again. True again. And this time I have no excuses for XUL. XUL is a cross-platform GUI toolkit and application development framework that is capable of being delivered over the web. But it runs only from within two browsers (Mozilla and Firefox).

The XULRunner environment makes XUL runnable as standalone applications. But it does not make it run inside IE. That's where it falls down. If you want a "web" application, XUL is out.

So if XUL is competing as a cross-platform GUI toolkit, that's capable of being delivered over the web, then it ought be compared with other such things, such as Java. And I would develop a Java GUI over a XUL GUI any day. Because XUL development is simply too different.

That practically left XUL nowhere to go.

P.S. A search for XUL on this blog reveals that I first mentioned XUL in this post 1306 days ago as thing to look into. And my finding back then was I liked the idea of writing a web app that has tree controls and table controls. But do Mozilla XUL apps count as web apps?

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on April 9, 2007 11:30:04 PM CDT #