Wednesday, October 17, 2007

New IBM Tutorial on XUL

I wrote a tutorial on XUL for IBM. It's a very introductory look at XUL. You can do some seriously crazy programming in XUL. The focus of the tutorial is on how web skills can be leveraged in XUL. Adobe AIR is getting a lot of press right now (and deservedly so) for letting web developers bust out some desktop apps. XUL lets you do the same thing. It's definitely a little more complicated than AIR, but also much more powerful. XUL gives you access to a lot more desktop resources than AIR does. Plus, if there's something that it doesn't already give you, then you can just write some native code and expose it via XPCOM. I think a lot of AIR developers are already begging for this kind of extensibility.

1 comment:

Maddy said...

Hi Michael Galpin,

Really a GREAT work by you.

thnx alot for this tutorial, it is really helpful for me.

one thing, you provide a directory structure for XUL application. in this structure u forgot to mention component directory, which contain the XPCOM components( .xpt, .so, .py files) created by user. i was using this structure in my application,

/myapp
/chrome
/content
main.xul
chrome.manifest
/components <---you missed it :)
abc.xpt
abc.so
abc.py...etc
/defaults
/preferences
prefs.js
application.ini