Introduction

Over the years, it has been difficult to easily develop user interfaces that are easy to change and are portable between platforms. In a world of competing technologies and platforms, what is a software developer to choose? Chances are, if you are a seasoned software developer who picked up this book, you have probably used many Graphical User Interface (GUI) toolkits over time - the UNIX curses library, X11/Motif, Microsoft Foundation Classes, and perhaps Java AWT/Swing. In order to change your GUIs, you have had to edit your code, compile, and test your user interfaces again. In many cases, you've had to use a lot of "ifdefs" to separate functionality between operating system platforms. Perhaps you have used a GUI toolkit that has tied you into a proprietary vendor. As a software developer, have you ever focused too much of your time on user interfaces, when the business logic of your application seems far more important? As software developers, we have constantly struggled with user interface issues.

In the last ten years, we have witnessed the impact of the open source movement on the Internet. As the web has evolved, we have seen how easy it is to develop user interfaces in HTML and XML. Wouldn't it be great if developing user interfaces for applications were as easy as developing web sites? This was the idea behind XUL - the eXtensible Interface Language.

XUL, an XML vocabulary, was designed by software developers at Mozilla.org to describe the look-and-feel of application-based user interfaces. In fact, the latest Netscape and Mozilla browsers are, in part, written in XUL! The web browser's rendering engine parses XUL and creates the look-and-feel of all of the browser components. Since only the rendering engine is ported between platforms, the user interface described by XUL is platform-independent. Since XUL is an XML language, it is an open standard, and it can be created, edited, and modified by any text editor - making user interface development as easy as developing a web page.

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