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List:       xul-talk
Subject:    [xul-talk] Purnama XUI: New Open Source XUL Toolkit in Java for Swing (LGPL)
From:       Gerald Bauer <gerald () vamphq ! com>
Date:       2004-03-08 13:16:12
Message-ID: 20040308131612.76577.qmail () web107 ! biz ! mail ! yahoo ! com
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Hello,

  Allow me to post Arron Ferguson's mail (with
permission of course) to get a discussion going about
the Purnama XUI project Arron leads.

  Note, that Arron himself subscribed to xul-talk and,
thus, Arron can answer your question directly.

    - Gerald   

   Here we go:

First off, thank you very much for your feedback. It's
nice to get some feedback and even nicer that it's
positive feedback. :o)
 
I can provide a little more information about Purnama
Project XUI. My initial intention for Purnama XUI was
to create a user interface specification that could be
used for the Semantic Web. I came up with the idea
after 3 years of playing with XML. I figured since
there were CUIs (comannd/console user interfaces) and
GUIs (graphical user interfaces) then there should be
an XML based one. That was my idea for calling it a
XUI. The name Purnama means "full moon" in Indonesian.
It is also my wife's middle name.
 
When I started this project for my undergraduate
degree at BCIT I wanted to build something cross
platform as well as able to plug into program code. I
had looked at XForms as well as XUL (and if I'm not
mistaken XUL is really the first XUI is it not?) but
decided that I would build something that could
possibly plug into other technologies. That was my
idea for Purnama Project XUI. XUL looked really
thorough but I didn't like the idea of embedding
_Javascript inside of it. I felt that the business
logic and event code should be separate. That was kind
of why I strayed from using XUL.
 
I started the project in January 2003 and by May
realized that I would never complete the RDF API nor
would I complete the Agent API either. So I completed
Purnama XUI and wrapped it up in December. I realized
also at that time that there was a similar project
(Xoetrope XUI). I had been turned onto that project by
Kimanzi Mati - the fellow responsible for SuperX++
(formerly X++) http://xplusplus.sourceforge.net/ .
SuperX++ is an OO programming language that uses XML.
Kimanzi and I talked about bridging Purnama XUI and
SuperX++ together to allow GUI building inside of an
XML-based OOP language. I regret not having gotten
back to him for a few months but I've been extremely
busy with work. If that were to happen both him and I
would have build versions of our API to each other's
platforms (he's doing it in C++/Win32 and I'm doing
XUI in Java - not to mention cross platform support in
other languages/platforms so that it's available
everywhere).
 
Anyhow, Purnama XUI would greatly benefit by having an
XML-based language that it ties to so that it's not
limited to each platform's binary (including the JVM
platform). I had originally intended that Purnama XUI
would be cross platform _and_ cross language but I
simply ran out of time doing this (see the section:
http://geekkit.bcit.ca/xui/web/html/beyond05.html ).
 
As for the present, I have tested the examples for
Purnama XUI and they seem to run with no hiccups. The
more interesting example is the Web Browser where the
entire GUI is based on the XUI document. A real
challenge I must admit was dealing with the
classloader and getting it to load images in and pass
them to a different classloader.
 
Again, I thank you for your feedback and I welcome any
feedback from the XUL group (or anyone for that
matter) with comments/suggestions about it. As for the
XUI license I plan on keeping it _always_ in the
public under LGPL and open as I believe that open
source and public licensing is the healthy way for all
of us to share ideas and advance computer
technologies: it allows 20 of us to come up with some
possible solution to a problem which then allow the
public to decide which one or ones address the problem
best. Sometimes it's more of a matter of taking pieces
or parts of various solutions to make one final
solution which addresses the problem. Part of the
reason why I think 20 different XUI's are a good thing.


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