Candid Talk about XULRunner

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Mark Finkle ran a developer day session for people creating applications with XULRunner and he has some great thoughts about he platform on his blog. I’m hoping to cover XULRunner more on ZDNet because I think it’s an interesting aspect of the RIA space. At my panel during the Web 2.0 Expo, we’ll be talking with the Joost developers about XULRunner, so I’m looking forward to that perspective.

Mark’s post addresses a lot of interesting issues with XULRunner including the developer environment and how XULRunner integrates with the operating system. It’s a great inside look at the strengths and weaknesses of the platform. I disagree with Mark when he says that he believes “the breadth and richness of the Mozilla platform surpasses that of Apollo and WPF/E” but I do think XULRunner can compete. It just isn’t quite at the level of Apollo in my opinion (and it’s also interesting to note he mentions WPF/E).

In the comment, there is a link to a very interesting blog post from someone who seems to be doing some XULRunner. It’s an even more candid look at how the platform works. I think the post nails it when it says:

Some part of me wants to say, yes, Mozilla/XUL will make it, but the richness (graphics / video / animation, usable interface markup / widgets, developer community) of WPFe/Flex, the WPF/Apollo deployment stories, and their security models, debuggability, desktop integration tales, and at-least-one-developer statistic make it hard to say, with puppy-fox-eyes “please don’t hurt the web: use open standards”…

Good food for thought and some interesting talking points for anyone interested in XULRunner.

[tags]XULRunner, Rich Internet Applications, Mark Finkle[/tags]

Related posts:

  1. Microsoft Flash Smack Talk
  2. Games Driving "WPF/E" Adoption and Great Stuff about Apollo’s "Competition"
  3. Rey, Rey, Rey, We need to talk
  4. Using SVG In Flex
  5. Firefox 3 Requirements – Better Support for Add-ons
  • Patrick Whittingham

    Ryan -

    I think Apollo is better since it is a smaller plugin and Adobe could push its Apollo plugin within the Flash plugin. This would make its adoption rate increase very fast. Also, I like how that ‘EBAY’ example works for offline/online. I think if Apollo is a small footprint then it will win. I’ve read it is a large footprint in its Alpha version.

    Pat

    Pros:

    * Runs in its own process
    * Unaffected by other Firefox extensions, skins, configuration.
    * Doesn’t require Firefox

    Cons:

    * Doesn’t auto-update with Firefox, auto-update code would need to be written
    * Unaffected by other Firefox extensions, skins, configuration.
    * Install package would be larger download to include the XULRunner binaries (13MB more)

  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd John Dowdell

    I’ve always like XUL and its ideas, but have been surprised that it never took off. Today there’s a lot of talk about the runtime packaging (every app includes full copy of XULRunner), but when I’ve asked people over the last 3-4 years they’ve cited the low level of development reliability as the stopping-point. Seems like it has gotten a new lease on life the past month, though.

    jd/adobe

  • http://jinsync.com leslie

    Hi Ryan,

    Nice blog — you cover this space like nobody else.

    ~L

  • http://www.kur-und-gesundheitsreisen.de Birger

    Hi Ryan,

    I just would like to say: that I visit your blog from time to time and that I belive it´s greate.

    Best wishes from Germany
    Birger

  • http://www.chez.com/netcom714/agenda1.htm ludo

    I ‘m interested in the topics discussed but have been feeling a little intimidated by the thought of the work. I wish I would’ve known about this sooner.