[Seaside] XUL

[Eric Hodel]

Avi Bryant (avi at beta4.com) wrote:

> 
> On 12 May 2003, Eric Hodel wrote:
> 
> > It seems the focus nowadays is to use SOAP/XML-RPC to communicate
> > with XUL (or, at least, that's what the webpages are written about).
> 
> Really? Searching for "xml-rpc", "soap", or even just "rpc" at the
> xulplanet.com website yields no results.  Doing an "xml-rpc XUL" search in
> google doesn't give anything very exciting either.
> 
> Where is this focus more evident?

(Ok, so I can't find a ton of examples either, but bear with me here,
I've worked with Mozilla enough to get this feeling that it isn't as
useful being dynamically generated as it is being static, and pulling
data from the server.  I'm biased.)

The best-known example is the Mozilla Amazon Browser -
http://www.cfmentor.com/~faser/mab/ which uses Amazon's (is it SOAP or
XML-RPC) interface to search for books, fetch prices, and read comments.

O'Reilly has several articles on mozilla, including its SOAP API.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/javascript/synd/2002/08/30/mozillasoapapi.html
(pardon if I fudged the URL)

While it is certainly possible to dynamically generate XUL, it doesn't
make as much sense as it does for HTML applications.  XUL is much more
suited for being persistent and exchanging data with the origin server
because it has an excellent javascript engine, it speaks SOAP, and
XML-RPC, can build content from an RDF file, or can parse a regular old
plain-text or XML file.

Hrm, this actually makes me wonder...

Serving static XUL, and having it fetch data from Seaside (or similar)
with a lightweight data-exchange format that allowed the XUL UI to
both display and modify data...

(But that's pretty far out)

-- 
Eric Hodel - drbrain at segment7.net - http://segment7.net
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