August 31st, 2003
Alice Corbin has compiled XUL Periodic Table (requires a Mozilla browser) with all the widgets available in Mozilla XUL. Excellent reference, especially because the source is available at the click of the ‘Source’ tab. Keep this close at hand whenever you’re writing a Mozilla application - you’ll thank her for it.
May 29th, 2003
Just in case anyone wants to follow up on the last XUL article by Harry Fuecks, SitePoint has published the 2nd of 3 parts in his introductory XUL tutorial, entitled Introducing XUL - The ‘Net’s Biggest Secret: Part 2. Seems like SitePoint split up the entire article series a little too much, because this one seems a little too short. The final installment promises to discuss XBL and RDF data sources, so that’s looking good.
May 25th, 2003
Championship Manager 4, the newest installation in the Championship Manager series of football management simulation games, uses XML-based skinning. It may be old news, CM4 being released 2 or 3 months ago, but I didn’t realise that until I checked out the sources for some CM4 skins, and much to my surprise, the only files I saw were XML files and images. Now not only is that very cool, it is also reassuring that game developers are taking the XML-based UI design paradigm seriously.
You can get CM4 skins from cmskins.com.
May 24th, 2003
There’re some interesting threads over at SitePoint Forums:
Java or .NET — What to Learn??
Head-to-Head: PHP vs. ASP.NET
Also, Harry Fuecks from phpPatterns() has recently written an article on XUL entitled Introducing XUL - The ‘Net’s Biggest Secret: Part 1 for SitePoint. Nice introductory article, but he does seem to make it (XUL programming) more difficult than it actually is by involving the PHP bit.
May 24th, 2003
Thinlet is a Java GUI toolkit that I’ve been using in my recent project. It allows you to design the view of your applications using a simple XML format (much like XUL), thereby enforcing clean separation of view and controller, a common fallacy in Swing-based or AWT-based programs (not saying it can’t be done, but it is often too easy to mush your view and controller together). Best of all, it works on a PersonalJava environment which is the target platform for my application, so there won’t be problems porting it into PDAs. There is limited functionality, though to be sure, the developers are actively implementing new widgets and functionality upon user requests. For example, automatic sorting of lists and popup (context) menus are already in the latest CVS sources. The developers are also spending time refactoring their design, since Thinlet is basically 1 gargantuan class with 6000+ lines of code. Nevertheless, it’s simplicity and portability across even limited platforms is a big factor in applications where it matters.
Check out a demo of Thinlet widgets as well as an Amazon browser (it works - try searching something on it).
Through my search for a suitable XUL or XUL-like toolkit, Luxor XUL and jXUL turned up. jXUL, unfortunately, has seen no developer activity since late 2001, but Luxor XUL seems great, only it depends too much on Java 2 APIs to port easily. I’m not too sure about committing to jXUL in future projects without a good look at the functionality provided, but I’m pretty sure Luxor XUL would be worth more than a look.
XUL periodic table
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