This thread is getting quite sociable. :-) On Friday 21 November 2003 12:58 pm, Adam Turoff wrote: > The "phat" clients you describe are something of a holy grail for > technologists. Technically, they're better solutions than rewriting > everything in Java, relying on Qt or Wx for cross-platform products, > working within the contraints of [X]HTML/HTTP, porting to C# (and hoping > Rotor/Mono work out if you need cross-platform support) or cracking open > that copy of Petzold's Win32 programming that's sitting under your monitor. > > These are the kind of toolkits toolsmiths want to write, but do they > provide the kind of environment workaday hackers want to use? So far, > the answer is a resounding "no".
I believe the answer to this question is left up to the developers themselves. Like the saying "If you build it, they will come", if a killer tool is available, people will use it if it (a) meets the needs of the moment, (b) is easier to do than the equivilant task using current tools, or (c) the resulting application would be otherwise impossible or impractical to implement any other way. I for one am implementing two applications in Mozilla XUL at the moment; an intranet application that is already a successful, and horribly slow, web app, and a refactored interface to my CMS that already functions through standard HTML. The reason for this is simple; stock HTML just doesn't cut it for me. I could probably limit myself to one browser and leverage all the fancy JavaScript capabilities it provides, but this assumes those capabilities are standard across all versions and platforms of that application. I'm dropping support for IE and Konqueror, simply because I cannot support the differences in JavaScript and DOM implementations across three browsers. If I'm going to focus on one browser (Mozilla, since there is a requirement that the applications are accessible from both Windows and Mac, and I develop under Linux) I might as well take advantage of all it has to offer, and use all the bells and whistles that it provides me. That means XUL, and that means the burdon of developing menus, toolbars, treeview and the like are now handled by native widgets and I can get on with the job of making the thing work. > The reason why webapps made it big is because they solved many of the > nasty problems of client-server software created, and solved those > problems by breaking all the rules. There's a *huge* class of > applications that shouldn't be done with fat clients, and the web solves > that problem 9 times out of 10 -- with CGI, PHP, J2EE or mod_perl and > AxKit. This is true, but to follow the C adage "C makes easy things hard, and hard things possible." Writing XUL apps is not meant to be the norm for web application developers, just as writing a simple home page for your grandmother's cookie recipe need not be written in AxKit/XSLT. The fact that the XUL and phat client developer community isn't as large as the HTML/PHP/CGI community is comparing apples to oranges. I think a closer analogy would be to match the XUL community with intranet Oracle Reports applications, or SAP and all it's ilk. > Case in point: XUL has been around for years (both in development and > release), yet it is not widely adopted as a platform for software > development. I think this has largely to do with the fact that Mozilla for teh past few years has been such a bloody slow beast that no one wanted to write applications for it. I myself had a hard time, until Firebird became stable. Now it's a joy to write for, even though the learning curve is pretty steep. > (I'm waiting for someone to create a desktop app called AmazonShopper > or something that de-clutters the shopping experience at Amazon. Or > not, depending on what their license permits.) Check out http://mab.mozdev.org. It's a Mozilla app for searching / browsing Amazon's product catalog. ;-) -- /* Michael A. Nachbaur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * http://nachbaur.com/pgpkey.asc */ Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
