In reply to Paul's comment: "I'll never understand why we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory."
I'd like to throw in my 2c worth. I'm a bit frank about my opinions and I suspect that I might offend a few people and demonstrate my ignorance of XUL at large at the same time. After reading Paul's post, I guess I got a bit riled up, because it's perfectly clear to me why the XUL community has failed. First, the idea that there is anything to claim victory over regarding the "pure" XUL concept is a fallacy. Let's look at XUL from the perspective of the typical programmer. Where is the form designer to compete with Visual Studio? Where is support for MFC? Where is the support for COM? Where is the support for plug-in's? And that's just the questions from the perspective of a Window's developer. I'm sure the Mac developer has very similar questions. As a developer myself, I wouldn't have wanted to touch XUL with a 10 foot pole, lacking these essential requirements. Second, where is the security? At least Microsoft is addressing the issue of security with the concept of a binary markup. Many of my users have brought up concerns about the security of markup, when the customer can easily change the markup. Not a good situation. Sure, for the open-source egghead community, that's what it's all about. For professionals trying to earn a living, privacy and security is a key issue. Third, what about performance? Runtime parsing is a lot slower than compile time GUI generation. Fourth, what about licensing? A lot of these XUL parsers are GPL licensed (including my own). Very few people want to touch a GPL project. MySQL got it right when they offered a license for closed source commercial application distribution. How many of the other XUL creators provide that option? Fifth, where are the XUL parsers that work with C++? Of the list that I've seen Gerald post, I haven't seen one! Am I missing something here? Is the XUL community like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand on the Java beach, ignoring every other important language out there? Sixth, until .NET came along with reflection, writing an XUL parser was a PITA. Any custom COM object, plug in, component, heck, even any custom classes you wrote in your application would need some form of customization in the parser to extend it. The whole concept of declarative markup to instantiate classes, set properties, and instantiate collections was basically an exercise in futility (or an interesting lab experiment) before .NET and reflection came along. Seven, the concept of XUL is beautiful. But how much education as the XUL community done to teach programmers about the flexibility of decoupling presentation layer from event process, similar to the MVC pattern? Try googling on "MVC" or "Model-View-Controller". It's a desert waste land out there, and the few references (except for the Sun Java site), get it wrong! The underlying concepts of XUL is closely tied with the MVC pattern, agile programming, and aspect oriented programming. If people don't understand those concepts, they'll never buy into XUL. I could probably go on. I'll stop now. I'd be very interested to read the feedback, because if anything, it's clear to me that XUL could never have achieved victory, whether Microsoft was around or not. It took .NET's reflection to make it truly useable. If you don't agree with that argument, then I can only fall back on the fact that the XUL community itself shot itself in the foot for the last 10 years. As the author of MyXaml, I'm trying to show that Microsoft's XAML implementation is, well, garbage. One of the key tenets of the MyXaml implementation is that the tags are generic and based on the underlying DOM of the classes that it instantiates. In my opinion, the concept of markup in conjunction with .NET's reflection is an incredibly powerful plug-in manager, component mediator, and general purpose instantiator. That's where I wish the XUL community had been moving for the last 10 years. OK, I'll really shut up now. Marc ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ xul-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xul-talk
