XUL:IDE

There seem to be many projects around to create a development environment up for XUL. I was under the impression that most of the were dead, but reading in the recent days tells me that I wasn't completely right.

I call on developers of those tools to take a minute or two and describe what their tool is, which platform it has, target audience, development team, status etc.

Overall comments are probably directed best to n.p.d.xul.

Blogosphere

Re: Eclipsing Firefox (AxelHecht)

Java XUL Parser? (R.J. Keller)

Existing Projects

XulApp

Project owner: Peter Wilson - single developer. The project is hosted on http://xulapp.mozdev.org/

The orginal XulApp version was a prototype incorporating a Project Explorer and drag and drop Form Designer. I also experimented with various forms of source and xml editors. This was originally developed in 2002. For several reasons the project went into hibernation. I have recently posted a revised version - minus bit rot.

A new version is now under development. This will be a complete redesign based as an XulRunner application. It is being designed in a modular fashion using FF extensions.

I am aiming for an extensible Project Explorer which can launch any number of installed tools. I am also hoping to integrate the Explorer with the Subversion source control system.

Currently, I have the IDE shell, project creation and project explorer working. I expect to upload some results within the next few days.

Also part of this development is a new Javascript library called XaLib. This includes the usual stuff, but also some new goodies:

• 1. File/Directory/Zip handling in a unified manner.
• 2. A SPARQL RDF query engine.
• 3. A RDFTemplate processor which can convert Javascript objects into RDF. This can also be used in conjunction with item 2.
• 4. A mru widget to implement most recently used file menu handling.
• 5. A really simple way to access widgets from JS. Goodbye to getElementById.
• 6. UUID generator (type 1, random node).

MozCreator

[updated by rjkeller - April 27, 2005]

Java-based Mozilla Development Environment. Currently can build JAR files and Firefox extensions. Tabbed environment and draggable GUI. Automatically generates content.rdf files. Requires Java 1.5.

I (R.J. Keller) have yet to update my more recent code on CVS and post a nightly build. Recent internal builds (should be up soon?) includes a GUI editor prototype and support for using my Java XUL parser in a MozCreator project which I whipped up real quick.

We should be coming up to a M2 release really soon. I’m waiting a bit on more hard-core XUL app building (with C++, etc.) until we have a XUL Runner release.

New features we're planning on implementing (first ones will be implemented first):

• XML project files (already done, just not on CVS yet)
• GUI editor (already partially implemented)
• Run compiled applications w/ XUL Runner
• Syntax highlighting
• Debugger (or integration with Mozilla XUL JS Debugger)
• Code completion
• Dockable GUI (like Visual Studio .NET)
• Some kind of API browser

Need Java programmers REALLY bad. If you’re interested, send mail to rj.keller@beonex.com

Other ideas

Solid (working title)

Solid (working title) is my pet thought of the day. It mostly vapour right now, though I have a somewhat working wizard to create xulrunner applications from scratch, just that xulrunner wouldn't run them right now. Oh, and that the code is pretty bad, I need to give it a MVC whacking. Though I gave it the l10n whacking already.

The name is pretty close to XUL IDE, and pretty far from the state of the code.

The best I can tell about it right now are a few (potential) scenarios that one (not necessarily I) could implement.

• creating xulrunner apps via a wizard (done up to refactoring)
• add a UI page, window, dialog, overlay
• add a translation
• add markers to translations for which another locale has had changes, on cvs check out, too (should be fairly easy)
• port over something like jssh to implement debugging

I hope that I can reuse editors for XML, js, DTDs and property files to some extent, but this needs to be evaluated.

Komodo

What about ActiveState Komodo?

According to http://vanx.org/next_meeting.htm it seems like they are using it for Application Development

XcUBE

The XUL Unified Build Environment

IBM's Compound XML Document Editor

Compound XML Document Editor

There's a demo for editing XUL!