Xul Titan Interview: Ovi Comes (of Zulu fame)

Hello,

  In the new Xul Titan Interview series I will
interview the movers and shakers of the Xul world. To
kick off the series let's all welcome Ovi Comes (of
Zulu fame).
 

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself (short
bio)?

Ovi Comes: I was born in Romania. I came to Toronto in
the late 90s. I have a background in computer science
and I work as a J2EE consultant.


Q: How did you stumble onto XUL?

Ovi Comes: It was so long time ago when I heard about
Mozilla's XUL project, I  don't even remember where or
how I discovered it. Although it looked like a nice
approach to define user interfaces, I didn't pay too
much attention. I've played a bit with it trying to
create a customized Netscape browser and that was it.
At that time I didn't see it outside of Mozilla
context.


Q: How did you get started on Zulu?

Ovi Comes: Back in 2002 I was working on a P2P
application that I wanted to have a nice skinnable
user interface. I was already flirting with the idea
of a Flash based user interface for some time but I
wasn't into Actionscript at all. Furthermore I wanted
that P2P application to be accessible not only from
the desktop but to have a web interface as well. So my
first thought was to apply an XSL transformation on
the XML stream provided by the presentation controller
to produce HTML for the web interface. Then, while
searching for ways to improve the interaction with the
desktop / flash interface, instead of hardcoding the
look of the interface in a Flash movie template I
decided to allow the user to define it's own look of
the application. How?  Using XML. Then I remembered
about XUL. The task of writing a Flash interpreter and
renderer for XUL was pretty complex by itself so I
ended up starting a new project: Zulu.
 

Q: Can you tell us some challenges you faced building
a XUL player using Flash and ActionScript?

Ovi Comes: Well, I guess the most challenging and
frustrating part was to understand the various
concepts of Flash programming. I have a C++ background
and in the last seven years I didn't work on too many
things outside of the J2EE world. Coming back to
client side programming, catching up with Flash
concepts, learning a new language and the associated
techniques, I think these were my biggest challenges.
 

Q: Can you tell us how popular Zulu is? (e.g. How many
downloads? How many applications use Zulu? etc.)

Ovi Comes: It's pretty hard for me to measure Zulu's
popularity at this time. I really hoped that Richmond
Post's "What is Your XUL Motor of the Year 2003"  poll
would help me have a better understanding of the
market. It gave me an idea, but while I'm very happy
with the results, the participation was sparse so I
can't say how popular Zulu is. There are a bit over
1000 downloads. I'm not aware of any applications
built on Zulu and seriously I don't expect anybody to
build an application based on the version 0.2 of a
product. 


Q: Who else is behind Zulu? Do you work on your own?
How much time do you spend on Zulu development?

Ovi Comes: Currently I'm the only developer of Zulu.
I'm working towards involving other people in plug-in
development. At this time, Zulu is still an experiment
so the time allocated to it is accordingly. 


Q: What do you think about Macromedia's Flex MXML XUL
dialect? How does it differ from Zulu?

Ovi Comes: MXML is just another dialect for describing
user interfaces. Anybody can come up with a set of
tags for describing how a window, a menu or button
should look like. Macromedia invented theirs simply
because they have the luxury to develop proprietary
standards and have their pool of users stuck into
their products. For small companies like Netspedition,
I think the  best alternative is to stick with the
standards. The main difference between Flex and Zulu
is not the XML dialect but the approach in delivering
rich interfaces to the client. Macromedia's Flex
requires a server component that compiles the MXML
source and sends it to the client in the form of a
Flash movie. Zulu has already been loaded by the
client at the beginning of the session. It then
renders on the fly XUL documents from any location, be
it a local file, a file sent over HTTP from any server
(not even necessarily the one hosting Zulu) or a
stream coming over a TCP/IP socket. 


Q: What do you think about Mozilla XUL? How does it
differ from Zulu?

Ovi Comes: XUL played an important role for me in the
early phases of Zulu development. I think the guys at
Mozilla have a done a great job here by trying to
create a standard XML dialect for describing user
interfaces. I really hope they will continue to
improve it and maybe even submit it to W3C. My goal
for Zulu is to implement most of the XUL specification
and to support this way Mozilla's effort of
standardizing XUL. Although at the core Zulu is XUL
based, there will be proprietary extensions made
possible by the rich set of multimedia features
offered by Flash.
 

Q: What's next for Zulu? Any plans for a
Drag-and-Drop-Style Designer for Zulu?

Ovi Comes: Short-term: implement as much as possible
from XUL specification, add support for various types
of plug-ins, third party pluggable components and
complex user definable behaviour. Add support for
pluggable user defined validators and skins.
Long-term: the Developer and Enterprise editions.
Future plans also include an Eclipse based editor with
real-time preview.


That's it. Thanks Ovi Comes. 
 
Full story and links @
http://xul.sourceforge.net/post/2004/02/xul_titan_interview_ovi_comes_of_zulu_fame.html

  - Gerald


PS: If you want to get interviewed next to highlight
your Xul project or initiative and offer
behind-the-scene insider stories please let me know.


-------------------------------------------------------
The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004
Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration
See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA.
http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn