[Sigia-l] Refreshing - What's RIA?

[Listera]

Dave:

> BTW, I am struggling w/ XUL being included in the RIA category.

Don't judge the book by its cover. :-)

XAML, XUL and MXML are, under the covers, pretty much the same thing: a
declarative approach to building an application, not through Java/C#/etc but
through a tag-based markup language.

If that sounds like building an HTML app, it is. The problem with the HTML
DOM is that the set of primitives available are not conducive to building
visually rich applications.

XUL offers a richer set of tags than HTML, like an editable menulist, tree,
datagrid, etc. It lays out components, styles them via CSS, gets data
through RDF and handles events using JavaScript inside a Mozilla container
that is the browser.

XAML and MXML, structurally, do exactly the same thing using different
ingredients.

The reason why you don't get to see flashier (!) XUL examples is one of
constituency: paucity of experienced interface designers in the open source
community. The Flash community, for example, has thousands of
designers/developers capable of cooking up rich components in Flash IDE
which can then be called directly via MXML.

The open source community has proven that, given a bit of commercial
backing, it can produce fairly polished products like FireFox and Camino
that are every bit as good as any proprietary web browser out there. So
let's not rule out XUL just yet, even before the RIA wars started. :-)

----
Ziya

When 2+2=4, it's development,
When 2+2>4, it's design.