XUL Domino View
I've always been interested in getting to know more about XUL. Over the weekend I found myself wasting spending some time having a play with it. Taking a starting point from Wolfgang Schmidetzki I produced a Domino view in XUL. It looks like this:
Want to see for real? You need to open the database - it's here - making sure you're using a Mozilla-based browser (any platform will do). There's one view in the database. Click on it (just so you know it's a normal view you're opening).
Nice isn't it. It's so easy too. Look at the source code; there's hardly any code involved at all!
Double-click a document to open/edit it. The New Document button works but the others don't. Also, you have to reload the whole page to update the "view" after creating a document. It's rough, but hopefully, it proves a point. I'll talk about the point tomorrow.
For more inspiration look at Wolfgang's XUL Portal screenshot.
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How do i get the view to open? Clicking on the "test" view prompts to download a file?
Use Firefox or Mozilla ?
He that's cool, I can change the order of the columns trough drag and drop!
That is cool. I took a look with DOM inspector... the XUL is separate from the HTML document, which means you could probably get your view to refresh asynchronously without affecting the form displayed.
Very very nice, Jake.
Larry. You can add/remove columns using the little picker to the far right of the column headers too. It's like what the Java View Applet *should* have been ;o)
In theory we could make the columns sortable and add right-click features to it. Think Thunderbird inbox! The possibilities are almost endless...
Jerry. You can have the source for the tree/view be an RDF document and have it update at will. I think. Still lots to learn. Just not sure if I have the time to invest in it. It's very interesting, but is it worthng get to know in detail?
Jake that certainly is good stuff, thanks for the demo. I had to do a quick Wikipedia to find out what XUL was all about.
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If I click on the "h" it goes to the document with the title "hallo". If I continue typing with the "e" it goes to "hello".
If I click several times on the "h" with a short pause, it goes to the next document starting with an "h"
What more secrets does it have?
This is more than web development, this is full application development! Great for the CRM tool you wanted to buy/create. If you can create a CRM tool with this, I donate the first EUR 500!
But is it accessible? ;-)
Btw, it actually errored for me with Firefox 1.5.
Jake,
it looks like someone has broken the view with an apostrophe. You might want to escape that out...
tq
Woops. Fixed that now.
You're right Larry. It would be great for a CRM. It would of course be open to use from anywhere in the world. All you need is a computer with a Mozilla browser installed. What % of internet cafes cater for this I wonder?
@Jake
Could this work out?
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Based on the enthusiasm of the few responses so far, and the potential for applying this to just about ANY domino application, I think it is worth getting to know in detail, Jake.
P.S - just noticed the new Rockall Logo... very sharp!
This looks great but the issue is browser support. Without it working in IE, I know this is not going to fly with a lot of my customers.
Bummer, as it looks really promising.
xul does have limited use in the browser. It's not in IE and likely never will be. In Firefox, remote xul cannot access xpcom. However, in local xul, accessed via the chrome: protocol, it is a very rich environment for building rich client apps. Firefox itself for example. Another is Komodo (www.activestate.com), a tool I use every day. In local xul the column-picker, column ordering and column width ( Jake, add <splitter class="tree-splitter"/> between the treecolumns) are persistent...stored in your local xul cache giving user view customization entirely on the client.
But even loaded from a server, a Notes view implemented in xul feels better than any dhtml (ajax) view I've seen. And remember, it's all styled with css. I no longer have an account for serving Domino. Maybe I'll sign up and post some examples.
Here's a website wich descripes the pro and con of 6 different techniques to create a richtext application (XUL is one of them).
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XUL really is great but when I remember your accessability article then it is a no-go to use...
I am currently delving into Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) which I think is a bit like the client counterpart to XUL.
When you see how easy it is to create a really professional looking client then you understand why IBM is moving to the Lotus Workplace technology.
Everything that demands for hacks in Lotus Notes is just there ready to use in Eclipse.
Imagine you need to implement a reporting mechanism, you just include the BIRT plugin and you can build professional reports in some hours...
I haven't used xul. There are complaints that people encountered problems, when trying to construct a bit more complex UI. My prejudice is that its smart but a too coarse grained approach for designing guis. Follow this with lots of interest, though.
Accessibility on the mozilla platform:
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Accessibility on the mozilla platform (take 2):
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Dan, regarding accessibility: what I wanted to say is that your web site is only accessible to Mozilla users when you use XUL. I used the wrong words :-(
I remember huge discussions between Gerard Bauer (check Richmond Post on google) and the very smart regulars on de.comp.lang.java.
In the years 2002/4 Gerard Bauer showed very aggressive manners to promote his java-xul stuff.
The arguments against xul seemed to point to the issue of lack of control for special cases, because xul were to coarse grained.
But I am no expert in this and don't want to bring people down. Just my prejudices.
I use "xul" to refer to mozilla's xul implementation which usually means xul+xbl+xpcom+javascript running on gecko.
My interest in xul is not as a web language but as a rich-client language. See Komodo, nvu, songbird and of course Firefox itself and all the other mozilla apps.
The Eclipse RCP (I really like SWT) is nice but even after using jython I'm losing the jvm love. But that's just me. It will be interesting to see any Eclipse RCP based app ever reaches the distribution leve lof Firefox.
The next generation GUI seems to be "something" like XUL. There are many different one but all rely on XML:
1. XUL running on gecko
2. XAML for Windows Vista
3. OpenLazlo (using Flash)
4. ....