On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 9:50 AM, Göran Krampe <go...@krampe.se> wrote: > Hi Pavel and all! > > > On 10/10/2012 02:15 PM, Pavel Krivanek wrote: >>> >>> About XUL, what is your impression about its future and, do you plan >>> some replacement for it in the future, maybe with full HTML5, Amber >>> based maybe? >> >> >> XUL not fulfilled the expectations that have been inserted into it. >> The only big vendor that supports it is Mozilla. A the role of native >> non-web applications will certainly gradually decrease. So I have long >> wondered if I should devote time to this project. >> But XULRunner is actively developed and certainly in the long term >> will also. It is good enough for our needs and it is very close to the >> web development so possible future switch to HTML5 or something >> similar would be natural. From this point it is maybe better time >> investition than native UI bindings. > > > The XULRunner is very much such a "UI player" that I have envisioned for > over 20 years. Given the diversity of UI platforms these days I have always > thought the concept would gain more attraction - not less. > > On the other hand - the "no install" argument for pure web apps is still > very strong. > > One thing that could really boost the attractiveness of XUL is if we had > runners for iPhone/Android/WP8 etc. Quick googling shows a bit of > discussion, but no such beasts?
>From a conceptual point of view XULRunners is really nice project. I heard something about FirefoxOS for mobile devices. If it will be based on XULRunner than it is probable that there will be a version for other platforms too. >> If I will need it for some project (or if someone will support it), I >> will modify it for the web development too. > > > I really think you should consider talking a bit to Nicolas and take a look > at what he has been doing with Amber plus Pharo backend (in SmalltalkHub for > example) using Magritte and Promises etc. > > Amber has a Seaside-canvas style UI framework with components called > "widgets" etc, and taking your work in XUL and putting it into Amber seems > like a perfect fit IMHO. > > And it would also create a really nice native UI Smalltalk IDE. :) I played with the idea of combination of Amber and XULRunner. And I treid to do some experiments in this direction. Because then Amber would be standalone desktop Smalltalk implementation that would use XULRunner as Virtual Machine. Maybe sometimes ... :-) -- Pavel > > regards, Göran >
