Hi all,

I just read a neat article at IBM DeveloperWorks:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-appmozx/?ca=dgr-lnxw02MozillaXMLApplets

It's about writing GUIs with Mozilla's XUL.  I must say I'm very 
impressed.  XUL looks like a great idea.  Writing GUIs is traditionally a 
long and tedious process.  XUL is an XML-based way of writing GUIs very 
easily.  For example, here is a menu bar:

<menubar id="menubar">
 <menu id="File" accesskey="F" label="File">
  <menupopup>
   <menuitem id="f1" label="New"   accesskey="L" oncommand="new()"/>
   <menuitem id="f2" label="Open"  accesskey="O" oncommand="open()"/>
   <menuitem id="f3" label="Save"  accesskey="S" oncommand="save()"/>
   <menuitem id="f4" label="Print" accesskey="P" oncommand="print()"/>
  </menupopup>
 </menu>
</menubar>

So, defining the GUI structure is easy and clear.  All the programning 
logic is left for an actual programming language.

Unfortunately, it seems that the only language supported is JavaScript. =(
I don't particularly like JavaScript.

I was just wondering what it would take to be able to use Ruby for the 
programming logic.  I guess that one way is to convince the Mozilla 
project to ship Ruby with Mozilla.  But I wouldn't count on that.

Re-implementing XUL would be very difficult, I imagine.

But over-all, I think I like the idea of using XML for the GUI structure 
and a programming language for the behaviour.  This strikes me as a good 
combination (but then again, I am not a very experienced programmer).

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel Carrera    | OpenPGP KeyID: 9AF77A88
PhD grad student. | 
Mathematics Dept. | "To understand recursion, you must first
UMD, College Park | understand recursion".