Random Precision

This will be no revelation to some, but it’s becoming increasingly clear how user interfaces will be done in the future. We will specify UI components and layout in a markup language (old flavor: HTML; new flavor: XML), and we will use ECMAscript to add behavior to these components.

How many variations of this are there out there now?

• AJAX
• Mozilla (XUL)
• Flex/Apollo
• Windows Presentation Foundation (XAML)
• Silverlight
• OpenLaszlo
• Various widget/gadget platforms (Yahoo!/Konfabulator, Google, Mac OS X, Vista, Facebook, Pageflakes…)

The only (new) system taking a different approach seems to be JavaFX — which is kind of funny, given Java is XML’s home turf, more or less.

I wonder if we’ll see something similar for Mac OS X (beyond the widget API) and Linux — presumably separate versions for GNOME and KDE.

The back-end is still up for grabs, of course; I have yet to hear anyone suggest using ECMAscript for building business logic or web services. To tell the truth, I’m not sure why not; why doesn’t someone take the Tamarin runtime, or Mozilla’s Spidermonkey or Rhino, and build a general-purpose development environment around it? If we’re doing serious work in Ruby and Python, why not JavaScript as well?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Programming, Tech Industry, Teh Intarwebs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.