...
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?
If there were a single XUL standard then IDE developers would be motivated to create forms designers for it?
... Where is support for MFC?
What does that mean? Why would I want MFC in a cross-platform GUI?
... Where is the support for COM?
If you want that, you can have it: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/
... Second, where is the security? At least Microsoft is addressing the issue of security with the concept of a binary markup.
It does not make sense to conflate "security" with "binary". I won't bother addressing this point because it is nonsensical.
... Third, what about performance? Runtime parsing is a lot slower than compile time GUI generation.
And runtime conversion to native code is a lot slower than compile time conversion but that's the direction Microsoft is going with C#. Once again, I think that this concern is misplaced. Firefox and Thunderbird show that XUL interfaces are quite performant.
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?
ActiveState has built a proprietary application on Mozilla's XUL.
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?
Mozilla is all C++.
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.
XBL.
... 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.
You haven't made that case at all. I don't see any logic in that argument at all. Do you think that .NET is the only way to do dynamic loading? And what is it about .NET reflection that is so much more interesting than either Java or Active-X reflection?
Paul Prescod
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