In response to Kevin's post: > ... Just because a XUL motor, for example, is GPL, doesn't mean that applications written on it have to be.
I disagree. A GPL is very restrictive. It only allows applications to be built that are themselves open source. > ... The criteria above has been met by Java since (1997?), so I'm not sure I understand that sentence... Oops. I got carried away. You are correct. > ... Aspect oriented programming applies generally to all kinds of programming (in theory, if not in practice) - as do agile methods, but I can't see how either are pre-requisites to XUL. Only in the sense that they are a shift from typical programming practices (if there is such a thing anymore, but let's assume for the moment that one "typical" practice is the kind of disaster that you get when using the Visual Studio wizards). What AOP and Agile bring to the front isn't necessarily the issues of things like test first, separation of concerns, etc. Underlying these are some very important tenets that hark back to the original 1950's concept of a "subroutine"--a modular, plug in when you need it, component. We keep re-inventing the wheel and calling it something else, it seems. Underlying all of these approaches (and underpinning their success or failure) is, as you said, the "mind-shift required by programmers to understand the subtleties of true presentation/logic separation". Even more generally, the separation of all the different layers. An XUL application does this implicitly (or almost implicitly). And for me, that's a major selling point right there. But I'm not sure if many people in the program community are ready for this paradigm shift. To give you a simple example, I have a friend that I demonstrated the flexibility of a correctly implemented MVC pattern. His response was "Wow, this is cool" but "it's too complicated for simple things". Of course, missing the point that simple now becomes complex later. However, where I'd like to take the http://myxaml.tigris.org project is, once the designer is in place (a prototype will be ready any day now!) to aid the programmer in creating MVC patterns using the designer and markup. I've not seen this done before. We can also easily move into unit test code generation (http://aut.tigris.org being my other pet project). At least, from my perspective, things like XUL/XAML/et al., MVC architecture (not that it's the end-all of architectures, mind you), and unit testing will not be truly embraced until there are tools that make easing into (and out of) these technologies easier for the programmer. I'll consider it at least a partial victory when Microsoft implements a unit test generator/engine in VS, along with some useful pattern generation tools. 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
