![](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/static.flickr.com\/46\/115713836_cd8700d510_o.jpg\")
<\/a><\/div>\nFrom that picture you can see several things:<\/p>\n
- \n
- For starters, the gSpace extension<\/a> (which I consider an web 2.0 app) allows me to use my Gmail account as a storage server (just like an ftp service).<\/li>\n
- It’s cross platform, all you need is a XUL enabled browse<\/li>\n
- You can use right click and have customized popup menus (which you can’t on regular HTML apps)<\/li>\n
- It has an extensive set of widgets<\/a> that are not available for HTML, see the resizable tables all over the place. (Check out xulplanet.org to see how XUL works with Javascript and CSS – If you’ re already using Javascript DOM objects and CSS, it’s not a steep learning curve you have to go through to start developing with XUL)<\/li>\n
- ” hmm, I wonder what I can build with this…?”<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
But the only problem is… it’s not available in IE, and it seems like there aren’ t any XUL plugins available for it (if you find one, please let me know)<\/p>\n
So, I was looking for any solutions out there, and today Microsoft released another beta of IE7<\/a> with yet no mention whatsoever about XUL (come on Microsoft, you don’t need to spend millions in making people love you, all you have to do is release products that adapt to standards!!!, implement XUL for the sake of the web)<\/p>\n
If Microsoft enabled XUL on IE7 they could gain something very valuable, they could gain all the Firefox extensions, or at least Firefox Extension developers would start making the modifications to be able to register their extensions in IE7 (if the IE7 team decides to enable an extension mechanism ever)<\/p>\n
So it’s my hope that IE7 will include XUL, or maybe in one of its further “Service Packs”, oh, and also SVG support, then we could have full blown interfaces and vector graphics on the web, anything would be possible… but this is probably not in the best interests of Microsoft, they need to sell Desktop software.<\/p>\n
So one day talking about XUL and it’s potential, someone told me you couldn’ t create products on hope, I’m not sure if that’s the way innovators think, but when you’re serious about mass distribution of your web apps you can’t be too romantic about innovation (Although I like to thing “If you build it they’ll come” and developers need to push for innovation)… however, there are some people that aren’t waiting for IE7 to include XUL support, and they’re already way ahead on the race of XUL development. Sascha Schumann<\/a> is a long-time OpenSource contributor<\/a>, book author and consultant. Programming for more than 17 years, he is currently leading multiple large XUL projects for clients. Sascha runs the XUL Weblog<\/a>, a place where he shares his experiences and best practices when it comes to developing XUL applications.<\/p>\n
One of the things that caught my eye on his blog, was a post that refered to a very interesting project that might allow bringing XUL to IE.<\/p>\n
As every web developer knows, Mozilla is a far more advanced and cleaner web rendering engine, but it lacks something, it cannot be used as an Active X component, and IE can do this, and many applications already embed IE on them, examples are AOL, Encyclopedia Britanica, Encarta, and many others.<\/p>\n
So based on this idea the Mozilla Active X Control<\/a> project was born, they already have several versions of the Active X out there, they have instructions on how to install it and use it with VB.net, VB, C++ and Delphi. The Active X is only 4.5mb (not 10mb like the IE activex) since it includes the Gecko and a few things that it needs.<\/p>\n
So yes, using that Active X control inside IE, you might be able to run XUL on it, but this still has to be tried, please be my guest, I’m not a windows user, and I wish I had the time to do more than blog about this.
\nAnd dreaming a little more, the perfect combo for a webdev, would probably be XUL + Python (instead of javascript) to have a real Object Oriented language and avoid problems you come across today with big javascript apps, (At least XPCOM components can be built using python<\/a>) but that’s another story<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I strongly believe the REAL web 2.0 applications will run on something called XUL, as it is the web 1.9 not only runs on fancy javascript (aka AJAX), but it already does use XUL. You might not know what XUL is, but if you’ ve been using Firefox, you’ ve experienced it. In simple terms, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gubatron"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5Unzf-4v","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":283,"url":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/podcast-episodio-004-michael-kakei-me-entrevista-sobre-opensource-via-skype\/","url_meta":{"origin":279,"position":0},"title":"Podcast Episodio 004 – Michael Kakei me entrevista sobre OpenSource via Skype","author":"gubatron","date":"April 2, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Escuchalo en tu web browser sin esperar descarga (descarga el mp3 o stream con VLC) Este es el primer podcast en espa\u00f1ol. El tecnologo Kakei (kakei.us) me hace una entrevista desde Maracaibo,VE a Jersey City, NJ via Skype, una entrevista uno a uno sobre la experiencia del software libre, sus\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Geeklife"","block_context":{"text":"Geeklife","link":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/category\/geeklife\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":473,"url":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/opiniones-de-joost-beta-v081\/","url_meta":{"origin":279,"position":1},"title":"Opiniones de Joost Beta v0.8.1","author":"gubatron","date":"March 4, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Para los que no saben que es Joost, brevemente, es un servicio de Television por internet que funciona de manera hibrida entre servidores centrales que contienen el contenido mediatico y una red peer to peer, es un startup creado por Janus Friis y Niklas Zennstrom los padres creadores de Kazaa\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Geeklife"","block_context":{"text":"Geeklife","link":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/category\/geeklife\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":348,"url":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/episodio-0024-aeromall-y-el-ipod-de-microsoft\/","url_meta":{"origin":279,"position":2},"title":"Episodio 0024 – Aeromall y el ‘iPod’ de Microsoft","author":"gubatron","date":"July 18, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Descarga en mp4 | Suscribete en iTunes aqui En el episodio de hoy: NTFS con lectura y escritura en Linux alfin?(Richzendy Blog | Anuncio Original en SourceForge.net) Saludo especial de David Ochoa de BYTE Podcast Un clip de papel por una casa (clip tomado de Byte Podcast) Saludo de Javier\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Episodios"","block_context":{"text":"Episodios","link":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/category\/episodios\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":821,"url":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/joost-pisses-off-open-source-software-community\/","url_meta":{"origin":279,"position":3},"title":"Joost pisses off open source software community","author":"gubatron","date":"June 3, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"After Joost Support Team member under the name \"Lodewijk\" pretty much gave a response that told the Linux community to fsck themselves in regards to a Joost version for the Linux operating system, what could've been a regular Forum thread became mainstream today when it hit the digg.com homepage. Read\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Geeklife"","block_context":{"text":"Geeklife","link":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/category\/geeklife\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":252,"url":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/my-firefox-wallpaper\/","url_meta":{"origin":279,"position":4},"title":"My Firefox Wallpaper","author":"gubatron","date":"February 3, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"If you want to have a simple Firefox Wallpaper, here's the one I have. I grabbed the image from http:\/\/ie7.com and turned it into a 1024x768 image for my KDE background.","rel":"","context":"In "Geeklife"","block_context":{"text":"Geeklife","link":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/category\/geeklife\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":116,"url":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/mi-franela-de-firefox\/","url_meta":{"origin":279,"position":5},"title":"Mi Franela de Firefox","author":"gubatron","date":"March 9, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Es un poco trizte escuchar las noticias esta semana sobre la falta de motivacion en el proyecto Firefox. Pienso que esta noticia fue publicada por 2 posibles razones: 1.- Microsoft y otros Browsers queriendo bajar los animos de los usuarios que apoyamos Firefox, la guerra contra Firefox ha empezado. 2.-\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Gubatron"","block_context":{"text":"Gubatron","link":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/category\/gubatron\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gubatron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}