[Seaside] XUL

[Avi Bryant]

On Thu, 8 May 2003, Stephen Pair wrote:

> Has anyone built any applications using XUL (as opposed to HTML...see
> http://xulplanet.com for more info)...I'm considering building an
> application using Seaside for the server and XUL for the GUI (it needs a
> richer UI than HTML can provide).  XUL seems like a nice alternative
> because it's supported by Mozilla/Gecko and thus runs on any platform.

I've never written anything with XUL, but I have played around with it a
bit.  The problem with using it with Seaside is that it's expecting a very
different interaction style - basically you're supposed to load the entire
UI at once, and control it with javascript on the client side.
Connections to remote datasources are all done through RDF, which feels
extremely unwieldy and heavyweight.  I did do some experiments in Seaside
0.9x with abusing XUL widgets as if they were HTML widgets, and ignoring
all the JS and RDF stuff, but ultimately I wasn't very impressed.

I do think it would be interesting to try to build an extended thin client
to work with Seaside - something that has the same interaction model as
HTML/HTTP, but fewer limitations in terms of available controls.  I
suppose if you built the client in Java or Flash, communicating with
Squeak over XML-RPC or some such, it would have almost the same
penetration as HTML... but I've never been convinced, yet, that it would
all be worth the effort.

Avi