XUL Base

XUL has been around since around 2000, why is it getting so popular now you might ask.

Well, thanks to the continued rise in popularity of Firefox, XUL has been getting the attention it deserves. There are currently thousands of extensions available to even further improve the web experience. From efficiency tools to data feeds, Firefox users get the most out of the web guaranteed.

XUL can be used to:

• Create Firefox browser extensions
• Create "Medium" size applications that can run "on-top" of Firefox
• Create cross platform stand-alone applications

Software applications are traditionally either web based or purely desktop. In the past, most destop applications that needed to do something "online" they embedded a browser component. With XUL you have the ideal environment.

Firefox extensions

As you might know, with XUL you can read local drives. This is part of the built in interfaces you can access with JavaScript and soon Python.

What makes it even more interesting is that you can get this information in RDF form and apply it to virtually any DOM element in your XUL interface.

There is a good tutorial about RDF datasources on the Mozilla Developer network.

Some real-world examples of XUL

* SimoHealth Software - Organize medical expenses and medical histories.

* World of warcraft (7 million users)

* Nokia Media terminals

* Wengo VoIP client

* Topstyle Css editor

* AOL browser

An interesting application for XUL is the combination with JAVA. With XULfaces you can deploy a rich XUL user interface with a JAVA backend.

XUL and Java Server Faces

• Light deployment Mozilla and Firefox have an integrated XUL engine, you can use your favorite web browser to run XUL application.

• Keep business layer on the server side XUL is fine for UI but if you want to access your business logic on the server side it turns to nightmare. JSF and AJAX pattern are used to build a bridge between the client and the server.

• Efficient but with rich UI features XUL offers a rich UI for business applications. XUL is simple XML language. There are trees, tabbed panes, list boxes, wizards,layout and so on.

You have the ability to refresh the entire screen or a part of it. Look at Thunderbird : it's a XUL application.