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Introducing XUL - The 'Net's Biggest Secret: Part 3
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What's the catch in all this? Speaking frankly (having lost more hair in the pursuit of XUL!), I can say that Mozilla (or whoever) really needs to wake up and start thinking about how things look from the outside.
For security reasons, using the XPCom SOAP API from a JavaScript that has been loaded directly from a Website requires the visitor to give their explicit permission before it can run in their browser. This is a good thing, but it requires developers to digitally sign the JavaScript, so that anyone who's loading your application can check your credentials before executing it. Fair enough...
Unfortunately, the official explanations of how you must sign your JavaScript read like beer mat doodles and are scattered across multiple sites, some of which look as if they were knocked up in half an hour. And don't get me started on the README file in the signing tool they recommend, which directs you to this up to date URL.
Perhaps I've been spoilt by PHP over the years, with its excellent documentation and amazing community, but why bother putting so much effort into building such a great technology, designed to make developers lives easy, then fall at the final hurdle? Compare that with the excellent job Microsoft has done in promoting ASP.NET and making it a technology which really appeals to its users, and perhaps you can forgive my complaining. This kind of thing reminds me of the days when IBM tried to sell desktop operating systems...
Moaning aside, XUL really is a great technology. Right now it’s got the official "it works" stamp of approval, but the paint still hasn't dried. XUL has reached a level where it's definitely worth putting in the effort to learn, but be prepared: there's still a lot to do to set up resources both for learning XUL, and developing with it. Right now the #1 development tool is the humble text editor, although the Luxor SWT prototype may soon bring XUL to Eclipse, and lead to another alternative to Mozilla as the XUL runtime.
To quote the Mozilla crew themselves:
"In the beginning, there were 3 front ends (FE's): mac, windows, unix. Each took a suite of developers to maintain. Adding a new feature (even just a button) required 3 engineers to waste at least a day (more often, a week) slaving away until the feature was complete. This had to change.What if we could be in a world where we could just write the code once? Where non-programmers could design the look and feel of a product using W3C standards instead of C++? Where platform differences could be expressed in stylesheets, not hardcoded with #ifdefs?
Do you like that world? So do we."
Resources
Creating Applications with Mozilla -- a free, online version of O'Reilly's book covering XUL and XPCom.
XUL Developer Central at Netscape.
XUL Planet -- a growing collection of tutorials and resources. The introductory tutorial should help to get to grips with all the important XUL elements.
The XP Toolkit -- more examples of XUL.
MozDev.org -- Mozilla's own "Sourceforge" for building XUL applications. Plenty of useful examples here, or even start your own project.
Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of IBM's Python and XPCom tutorial series on implementing "code behind" logic for XUL applications. Quote: "Implementation so simple it's scary…"
An introduction to XPCOM -- a fairly technical article series looking at the XPCom library.
If you use Linux, there's a "bridge" being built between XUL and Glade, called MozGlade, which should make it easier to build XUL applications.