Am I the only one who see the same story repeated again ?
We have now Facebook, a major actor on the web, who is developping a cross-platform toolkit for application development, using OS native widgets. XUL, I miss you :)
And now others try support different OS.
Mozilla created everything and they just failed to "market" it. It s at the same time a pain and a joice to see real JS applications, shadow dom, custom components, CSS based styling being the core of a toolkit while we saw XUL/XBL/CSS/native calls from Mozilla be killed a few months ago. It had its flaws, but it s a serious (but really difficult) way to go : Qt did it, Gnome did it, Microsoft did it, even Adobe tried to do.
Mozilla and people involved in previous ideas and implementations deserve a special mention for their work.
We really need such technologies, and that Mozilla killed theirs was a really sad choice for me. Creating software with "simple" markup, "simple" styling rules, "simple" event/user interaction handling should be a concrete goal of decades of languages/compilers/interpreters researches.
It has a price : performance, sometimes native look&feel not perfectly accurate, supported platform must have similarities. We may hopefully reach a level where a <button> tag will cost 1% of overhead against a native call and this will be a great day. I hope these new implementations will succeed, and that the actual overcomplexity in the web developpement will not land in though.
We have now Facebook, a major actor on the web, who is developping a cross-platform toolkit for application development, using OS native widgets. XUL, I miss you :) And now others try support different OS.
Mozilla created everything and they just failed to "market" it. It s at the same time a pain and a joice to see real JS applications, shadow dom, custom components, CSS based styling being the core of a toolkit while we saw XUL/XBL/CSS/native calls from Mozilla be killed a few months ago. It had its flaws, but it s a serious (but really difficult) way to go : Qt did it, Gnome did it, Microsoft did it, even Adobe tried to do. Mozilla and people involved in previous ideas and implementations deserve a special mention for their work.
We really need such technologies, and that Mozilla killed theirs was a really sad choice for me. Creating software with "simple" markup, "simple" styling rules, "simple" event/user interaction handling should be a concrete goal of decades of languages/compilers/interpreters researches.
It has a price : performance, sometimes native look&feel not perfectly accurate, supported platform must have similarities. We may hopefully reach a level where a <button> tag will cost 1% of overhead against a native call and this will be a great day. I hope these new implementations will succeed, and that the actual overcomplexity in the web developpement will not land in though.