choosing a (XUL) framework

Hello Everyone

I stumbled at the post at
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=11040958
and this is very much the question i have myself too.
My next Project will be an open-source managment solution for smaller 
non-profit NGO's.

Besides having some years of experience in software development i'm 
pretty new to open source enterprise development.

In a case study i'm currently working on, i ask myself which framework 
to choose, but my choice is not limited to XUL.

For several weeks i've been writing hello_world programms for different 
frameworks. and this is no easy task! :)

When choosing a development platform, a very important question to ask 
is if the adressed framework is or will be widely adopted by the 
developer community. Not just the functional (dis)advantages.

for last two weeks i was trying to test  openmdx - a very promising 
framework, if one takes a look at openCRX.
One of its advantages is the UML based Application specification,in 
contrast to  struts und co. the one wouldn't have to learn the semantics 
und properties of configuration files that might totally change or 
vanish in the next 3 to 4 years, specifying almost everything in UML.

after the two weeks of more or less unsuccessfull Eclipse-Tomcat 
Deployment of OpenMdx's Helloworld program, i've started to ask myself: 
what if i'll get stuck with a six-pages-long-exception-stack-trace 
pointing to somewhere deep inside of Framework code? and what if it 
would be to late to abandon the framework by then with the half or 
almost all of application development done?

the OpenMDX is very hard to setup thus it probably won't be widely 
adopted, and the google-search on error messages won't bring up usefull 
results. thus it won't be widely adopted.The commertial support won't 
help spreading it. So  what's the point in learnig an perhaps already 
dying technology?


This is probuably the case with any application framework - as long as 
everything works OK it gives you high level of abstraction and you don't 
have to learn it's inner structures. But let there be any trouble and 
you'll find yourself (or myslef :) staring on  thousands of lines  of 
frameworks code an wondering what that is all about.

to get back to the point:My next step would be to try out the 
genesis(thinlet) framework. have anyone got experience with this ?
Transparent remoting sounds very appealing- just write a desktop thinlet 
application and use it on client server.... but it doesn't seem to be 
widely used? whats wrong with genesis? is anyone using it?
















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