Luxor Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

General

• Why are there so few answers?
• What is Luxor? Why should I care?
• How does Luxor differ from Java's Bean Persistance XML Schema?
• Why not license Luxor under an Apache or Lesser GPL (LGPL) license?

Well, we only post answers to question we get asked. If you want an answer to a question please send your question to the Luxor mailinglist where we will answer it. Access is open to everyone.

To see how all the pieces fit together and why they exist and how you can benefit, check out the Luxor Tech Talk, December 2001, where Gerald Bauer (Luxor Project Leader) answers Jeff Duska (President of the Upstate Java Users Group)'s questions about Luxor.

• Luxor's XUL markup is not tied to Sun's Swing GUI toolkit, in the future support for alternative GUI toolkit such as Eclipse SWT, Trolltech Qt, Gnome Gtk+ and more will be available.
• Luxor is not tied to Java, in the future engines will be availabe for C#, Shark and other languages.
• Look at HP's Bluestone XwingML, a dead early XUL dialect a la Java Bean XML Schema Persistance, and you will see that dumping the state of a bean 1:1 in XML is a dead end.
• Luxor's XUL markup is designed like HTML for speed-coding in a plain-vanilla text editor. You don't need a GUI designer to untangle the unreadable haystack dumped using Java Bean XML Schema Persistance.

Swing XML Persistance Haystack:

<object class="javax.swing.JPanel">
  <void method="add">
    <object id="button1" class="javax.swing.JButton"/>
  </void>
  <void method="add">
    <object class="javax.swing.JLabel">
      <void method="setLabelFor">
        <object idref="button1"/>
      </void>
    </object>
  </void>
</object>

Java Swing Hard-Core Version:

JPanel panel1 = new JPanel();
JButton button1 = new JButton();
JLabel label1 = new JLabel();
panel1.add(button1);
panel1.add(label1);
label1.setLabelFor(button1);

Luxor XUL Contestant:

<hbox>
  <button id="button1" />
  <label  for="button1" />   
</hbox>

And the winner is... Do I need to comment?

You are more than welcome to license Luxor using a classic commercial license. If you're interested, please join the luxor-licensing mailinglist. We haven't yet worked out the details (pricing, packaging, support, docs, etc.). As it looks now we will ask for $600 for early birds (Beta sign-up) and $1000 for 1.0 sign-ups and later.

Here is a longer answer why we choose the GPL: We choose the GPL so we can build up an endowment fund for the Luxor Foundation using dual licensing. We don't have any sponsors (e.g. Sun, IBM, etc.) so using Apache/Lesser GPL isn't an option for now. Luxor is a multi-year effort like Linux. We won't run away after a couple of month but instead we plan to stay around for years to come. Having an endowment fund keeps Luxor alive. We also plan to sponsor an open-source developer in-residence program and start other initiatives to help the open-source community grow.

Note, that we also offer a payment-in-kind option, that is, if you contribute we will credit your efforts and you get a commercial license "free-of-charge". You're also welcome to sponsor missing features and get a "free" commercial license in return.