Stephen's Statements A little bit of everything from Stephen Duncan Jr, a Programmer/Web Geek working in the defense industry

Brendan's Roadmap Updates: OpenLaszlo and Eclipse

Brendan notes that Laszlo has released an IDE for LZX based on Eclipse. Noting the similarity of LZX and XUL, he asks for takers on patching it to support XUL. I hope we do find a taker, as that will be a huge step in allowing for people to adopt XUL. Not that yesterday's thoughts don't still apply.

Update: Brendan says they (Mozilla folks) are talking with the Laszlo people.

Stephen: we are already talking to Laszlo folks, and we'll see what can be done quickly. It may not pay to converge and standardize, instead of harmonize. Laszlo would love to target native support in Firefox, of course, but that's another Gecko extension to be written. If LZX evolves to use CSS and the full DOM and ECMA-262 Edition 3, then it's a better match to a future Gecko (+ extension) target.

Labels: mozilla

I've posted on this topic before.

From an interview with CTO of Laszlo Systems:

But now that the source code is open and available, we're working on establishing alliances to get this platform, especially the LZX language, to be a standard. That benefits us and the industry because this is the open Web. It's open source. It runs everywhere and runs in any browser.

Competition with Longhorn's XAML platform from Microsoft is mentioned, but Mozilla's XUL is not. What does this mean for the future of XUL? Will the split of competitor's between XUL, Laszlo, and the proprietary Macromedia Flex allow Microsoft to win?

The primary incompatibility between XUL and Laszlo is that XUL requires some portion of the Mozilla runtime environment to run, whereas Laszlo uses Flash. With Flash having a much larger install base, people look at Laszlo as being essentially zero-install on the client.

What I would like to see is Mozilla and Laszlo work together to come to a standard on the XML UI language. Then Laszlo could continue to produce a Flash-based implementation, while Mozilla continued to produce it's current implementation. Both implementations have pros and cons. Flash is cross browser; Mozilla is themeable, and has more native-like widgets.

I don't know what the currently techincal differences are in the languages, so I don't know how far away this concept would be to achieve. But I really think that it's got to be started now, if open-source is to compete in this field with Microsoft. Any ideas on how to get this ball rolling?

Labels: mozilla

I've put the new version of WinNoia up. I did it quickly, so let me know if there's anything wrong. This update uses the latest version of Winstripe, so all the new icons are there, and makes the theme compatible with 1.0+.

Labels: mozilla

Just got back from vacation with my in-laws. Now I'm setting up my new Tivo that they gave me for my birthday. And I find out that Firefox 1.0 has been released! So I'll be grabbing that shortly; go grab it yourself.

Labels: tech