For those who know HTML and client-side Javascript, it's not much of a stretch to learn Mozilla XUL and XPCOM. Combining this with the xulrunner runtime application from Mozilla, you can create fast
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, robust standalone or client/server applications for Linux, Mac, Windows, or any OS that Mozilla Firefox runs upon. And you can do it in record turnaround time. The applications can also support AJAX, rich edit controls, SQL database calls, processes and threads, sockets, and much other functionality.
If you're a newbie to programming, and know HTML and client-side Javascript, you should give this worth a look. And even if you're a novice or expert, this is also worth a look because it can speed up your time to deliver applications, especially for standalone applications on Linux.
I developed this sample because I felt that the only real way to develop Linux applications sort of halfway rapidly was to use Glade, Python, and PyGTK, but that was frustrating because some parts of PyGTK are either undocumented, poorly documented, or just don't work as advertised. So when I found out about XUL and xulrunner from Mozilla, I was naturally delighted to see something I could use to knock out standalone applications on Linux fairly rapidly.
Requires xulrunner, which you can get from Mozilla.com. [Less]