I had read Joe Hewitt on Boxely (from AOL) when it was in the works, but found through Matt that it has gone live.
I think these markup based UI development kits are better at portability as their application building technology is available on all platforms. They become portable once their rendering engine is ported on multiple operating systems.
Boxely is a desktop UI toolkit, very much like XUL, but supposedly lighter. It uses XML and JavaScript. Joe Hewitt has mentioned the reason for creating Boxely inspite of XUL, but I think the biggest disadvantage today is that the runtime engine is available only for Microsoft Windows. If I am developing on Windows, why wouldn’t I use XAML! AOL has to encourage cross-platform applications to be able to provide something more.
October 15th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
Patience is a virtue…Mac version in the works. From what I know…
October 16th, 2006 at 12:07 am
That’s good to know. But I think it would have been much better if the intention of cross-platform availability was included right from the beginning.
October 16th, 2006 at 6:41 am
It’s only a “preview” release… I’ve had working mac code for 4 years. ;o)
October 16th, 2006 at 8:06 am
Will wait for updates.
October 18th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
[...] We are seeing novel uses of markup languages, like publishing, syndication and even for desktop applications. Think about HTML, XML if you are uncomfortable with the markup languages phrase. There are different categories of markups – presentational (HTML), procedural (Tex, PostScript) and descriptive (XML). [...]
November 2nd, 2006 at 3:19 pm
[...] It will definitely be useful, but it should be really simple to use because its target users will not bother too much about technology. Blake does comment on Matt’s post and say that it will in fact be open source, and it will be great if it will be cross-platform. A disappointing thing, technically, might be birth of a new user interface language – JUL. The basket is already full! [...]
November 13th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
[...] Boxely is no more available. The comments have some meat there. Earlier speculation was about licenses, but now it seems the management did not approve of the public release. Corey had mentioned that a Mac version was imminent. I think Boxely shows a lot of promise, easier than XUL and intended to be cross-platform! UPDATE: It is back up, hopefully not to be pulled down again. [...]