An introduction to XML User Interface Language (XUL) development

Level: Intermediate

Michael Galpin (mike.sr@gmail.com), Software engineer, eBay

16 Oct 2007

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XUL is not just another UI language that has sprung up. It is a tried and true application framework. The Firefox browser is built using XUL. In fact, the upcoming Firefox 3.0 release will provide a XUL runtime allowing any Firefox user to run any XUL application. In this tutorial, you'll start to program in XUL. You'll see how to leverage your Web development skills to build a XUL-based blog editor. The editor will provide some basic rich text editing, and allow you to save drafts locally that you can reload later for editing.

In this tutorial

This tutorial is for experienced Web developers who are interested in desktop development but don't want to learn a lot of new technologies. XUL (rhymes with cool) makes it easy to use Web development skills to build desktop applications. It gives you a rich set of UI widgets with a syntax that is very familiar to any Web developer. With XUL, you can directly mix in HTML and make heavy use of JavaScript.

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Objectives

• Learn about the roots of XUL and its use in the Mozilla projects.
  
  
• Learn of XUL's key benefits and architectural design.
  
  
• Build desktop applications that leverage your existing Web application skills.
  
  
• Learn about the opportunities that the upcoming Firefox 3.0 release presents to XUL developers
  
  
• Dig into some XUL and write a simple application to create, save, and publish blog entries
  

Prerequisites

XUL is an XML-based language, so you'll need to be familiar with XML and especially XML namespaces. XUL is built on the Web technologies you know and love: HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. You'll need to be familiar with those technologies to be productive in XUL. You can greatly increase the capabilities of XUL applications by using XPCOM. This is a technology that is similar to distributed computing technologies such as CORBA/IDL and COM. Familiarity with those technologies will help as you learn about XPCOM, but is not required.

System requirements

You will need JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You'll need the following tools to follow along with this tutorial:

• XULRunner
• One of the developer builds of Firefox 3.0

Duration

1 hour

Formats

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