XUL Everywhere : IE, Opera, Eclipse, Swing !

Another post today (I'm flushing all my "To Blog" entries from the corresponding sticky on my desktop :-)...

I happily discovered, this week, that XUL is no more Mozilla / XPFE only. Many projects are on the way to put XUL into many other platforms like MS IE, Opera, Swig, Mono, and... Eclipse / SWT !!

I found that the last one is very interessant because it opens a new way for Rich Client. Maybe the best way : Eclipse RCP as the Rich Client Platform and XUL as the cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-media interface description language. The only thing I don't like with Eclipse is that we are forced to use the good old method to design interfaces : write code (and XUL was almost the only thing I like in XPFE). And since we have choosen Eclipse RCP as our Rich Client Platform, this news makes me feel good... I knew it would happend :-)

If we can gain from Eclipse as the plaform and XUL as the interface language, I think we can imagine many things (like porting web interface easily to rich client, integration simple XUL apps into Eclipse, make avalable an app from the web or from your Personnal Portal aka Eclipse RCP, etc. :-)

Links :

• Open XUL Alliance (gives lot of ressources and references many XUL motors)
• XSWT : XUL for SWT and Eclipse
• DXULi : a basic XUL interpretor for IE and Opera (seems to work with Safari too)

(Post originally written by Eric Barroca on the old Nuxeo blogs.)