Introduction to the XUL Runtime EnvironmentThursday November 7th, 2002Aaron Andersen of XulPlanet has written an introduction to the XUL Runtime Environment (XRE). ...but is truly lacking and sorely needed is an IDE that targets Mozilla development. Great opportunity there to build an ide in XUL for XUL development... The big stumbling block for XUL applications is the learning curve, IMHO. Doing GUI in XML is an idea whose time has come, but XUL just can't compete in the learning curve arena with Glade. For instance, here is a hello world app using libglade: from gtk import * from libglade import * widgetTree = GladeXML("hello.glade") signalDict = { "on_window1_destroy" : mainquit } widgetTree.signal_autoconnect (signalDict) mainloop () And here's one using XUL: http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/137/2000/10/0/4572822/ the formatting isn't quite right for that code, but suffice to say it's 6 lines, and there are no classes, com interfaces, special IDs, contracts, etc. Err, what you've linked to is a Python XPCOM sample. I'd say that's significantly more advanced than a XUL hello world app. I think that perhaps http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/examples/findfile/findfile-buttons.xul.txt is a better "hello world" style app. And to add interactivity, you can just write some javascript, no need to write C++/Python, but of course you can if you'd like. I think this is great that XUL will become an aplication runtime. How about using Java though? I never liked the swing UI widgets in J2SDK. I would like to see a Java API for XUL so programmers fluent in Java could take advantage of UI construction in XML using XUL. Keep in mind though XUL has the same problem as Java. Without a runtime engine the applications will not work. Also how about performance and garbage collection? How will complex applications run? Fast or dog slow compared to native applications. Any data on the performance issues? -Mark There has been an attempt to implement XUL in Java. I don't know how far the project got. It's probably been abandoned by now. OTOH, there is Blackwood and its Java-XPCOM brigde. Though this Mozilla project doesn't seem to be actively maintained. The fomer project will get you an all-Java-app the latter either a ative app with Java-extensions or a Java-app with an embedded Gecko. Masi So, if I understand it correctly phoenix tarball size can be decreased by another 2-3 MB if XRE is already installed? But if the XRE version is outdated you'd need to get a new one. It would be nice if it worked. But if you look at JAVA one big problem is that alot of software includes JAVA Runtime so you might find 5-6 versions of JAVA when you have a look at your harddrive. X |