David Hyatt: Why I Love Microsoft XUL

Hi,

  For those who don't follow the news. Microsoft
unveiled XAML on Monday in Los Angeles during its
Longhorn Dev Pow Wow.

  XAML basically is an all-in-one XML markup language
that replaces HTML, CSS, DOM, XUL, SVG, SMIL, Flash
and PDF with a single blow and will be at the heart of
the next Windows version, that is, Longhorn.

  To read up on XAML you might wonna start with the
latest XUL News Wire stories @
http://news.gmane.org/thread.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.xul.announce

  Now onto the Luxor connection.

  David Hyatt - Safari, Firebird and Mozilla XUL
legends - writes in his blog story titled "XAML
Ramblings at 2am":

The tags and attributes in a XAML file map directly to
classes, e.g., C# classes. All you have to do is make
a C# class that fits into the class hierarchy
somewhere (where to put it depends on whether you're
making a new widget, a simple piece of styled markup
like a bold tag, a drawing primitive, a layout
manager, etc.). As long as you make sure it has a
parameterless constructor, your object will get
created at that point in the "DOM hierarchy" and have
all of its fields properly initialized to the
attribute values supplied in the tag.

This is probably the single coolest part of XAML, the
"auto-mapping" from tags to C# objects. This was a
dream I had with XUL, but Mozilla never really had the
underlying framework to pull it off. This feature
gives you automatic extensibility and allows you to
easily implement your own layout managers and widgets,
something XUL has never been able to do. (XBL can be
used to create composite widgets in XUL, but not to
create entirely new layout primitives and widgets that
do their own layout/painting).  


  Well, as everyone knows already on the
luxor-xul-user mailinglist the Luxor XUL toolkit
already lives out the dream and sports "auto-mapping"
from tags to Java objects for more than a year now. 


  - Gerald   

PS: For those new to Luxor here are some links to get
started:

* Luxor Java Bean Plugin Example Suite @
http://petra.sourceforge.net/bean.html  
* Luxor Applet Plugin Example Suite @
http://petra.sourceforge.net/applet.html
* Create Your Own XUL Tags - Getting Started Guide @ http://petra.sourceforge.net/tutorial.html


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