Blue Sky - What's Next?

Luxor XUL isn't a Mozilla XUL clone and, therefore, welcomes any ideas that make building UIs easier.

You are invited to send your ideas to the Luxor user or dev mailing list so others can comment or support your ideas and we can pick them up.

We will put your ideas first in the undecided/needs more thought slot, before we move it either to upcoming, back burner or blue sky.

Ideas in the upcoming slot will show up in the next release or the release after. Assuming a release every six weeks, that's a waiting time of no more than three month.

• Luxor XUL W3C XML Schema
• Margin, Border and Padding CSS Properties
• Font CSS Properties (e.g. font-family, font family)
• Phyton scripting support; embed JPyhton interpreter
• SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) support thanks to Apache Batik

• Mozilla XUL Tree Tags Support
• Portlet Parameters (see Apache JetSpeed Portlets for inspiration)
• plugable XUL custom tags (see JSP Taglib API for inspiration)
• data provider XUL registry to let you use more than static, pre-packaged XML documents as datasources for datagrids, stylesheets, etc.; support URLs for datasources including offline-usage through caching
• custom hbox and vbox layout managers

Ideas in the back burner slot are not rejected, but will have to wait until all upcoming items are completed, no blue sky project are undertaken, and everyone lives in peace in the Middle East. Check back next year to see if anything changed.

• JavaScript support; embed Rhino JavaScript interpreter
• RDF data model support

Ideas in the blue sky slot are worthwhile but require major effort (that is, a couple of release cycles/months). You are more than welcome to start a project and lead the effort.

• Use Eclipse's Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT)
• Add Mozilla Gecko (industry-strenght, cross-platform HTML browser) using Project Blackwood/WebClient
• Use C# to create a .Net version
• Create an Ahead-Of-Time Compiler (aka Pre-Compiler) that reads in XUL documents and spits out Java code that you can compile before you ship your app that no longer builds your UI dynamically at runtime.
• Create a XSL/T script (aka code generator) that creates XulForm Java classes from the XUL form definition.