June 2004 Archives

Laurence Moroney - a senior architect with the Reuters Innovation Labs and Rapid Development Groups in New York City - has written up an article for the DevX site about Luxor, Mozilla and XUL titled "XUL - The Gatekeeper to Higher-level Web UIs".

Laurence writes:

The application that you will develop as a sample in this article is adapted from the famous Luxor calculator app, but has been extended to make it a Web service consumer. XMethods.Net host a Web service that accepts a ZIP code and returns a temperature. The WSDL for this file is available for inspection at http://www.xmethods.net/sd/2001/TemperatureService.wsdl.

The download included with this article includes all the source code as well as the JDeveloper workspace and project files. You can use these, or if you prefer a different IDE, you will need access to the Luxor jar file, available for download from the Luxor XUL homepage at http://luxor-xul.sourceforge.net.

Laurence concludes:

Don't forget that XUL also gives you a miniature Web server that you can embed in your apps to give peer-to-peer functionality, a scripting interpreter that is Python-based, and portal and template engines. It all adds up to a pretty compelling framework. With a rich and competent offering like Luxor XUL ready to use, it's easy to wonder why anyone would wait for XAML.