You Want XUL, You Got XUL

I've written a lot of articles for IBM over the last couple of years. I've covered a lot of topics. It was interesting for me to see which articles have been viewed the most. Last year I did a tutorial on XUL for beginners. To be honest, I really thought XUL was a very niche topic. If you are going to write a Firefox extension, you have to learn XUL. There are lots of resources out there about that. I did not want to write about that kind of XUL development. So instead I wrote about creating a XUL desktop application that used a lot of web development skills. Hey if Adobe can market AIR as a way for web developers to create desktop apps, then why shouldn't Mozilla do the same thing with XUL? It was a fun article to write, but I didn't expect it to be especially popular. Boy was I wrong!

That tutorial has been one of the most popular things I have written for IBM. So it made sense to update it this year. The tutorial used Firefox 3 as a XUL runtime. When I wrote it, Firefox 3 was in alpha stage. Obviously it has been released since then and is in wide use. So the opportunity for web developers to use XUL to create desktop applications is greater than ever. This week IBM published the updated tutorial, so go check it out.