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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Microsoft Hypes Up XUL As The Greatest Expiriment Since Ad
 Hi Gerald, At first, by the tone of the message, I thought that it was an ironic view of the new longhorn trend. But after I read the original article, I discovered with surprise that it was simply an extract from the original MSDN article from Petzold. I was even more surprised because Petzold usually doesn't write that way. Anyway... Thinking more seriously about this, I think that including declarative programming to define application's user interface is good. Off course, we all discovered (or for the old foxes - re-discovered) that with browsers. Generalizing this paradigm to the entire platform will put declarative programming on the map or more precisely will bring declarative programming to the mainstream programmer more accustomed to "object oriented" or "imperative" programming. Moreover, I think that the declarative programming influence won't stop at Microsoft. Usually, the open source developers are closely following what Microsoft is doing. I expect to see XML based languages like perhaps XUL to be included in gnome or KDE. However, if Gnome and KDE use the same language as Microsoft, the impact would even be greater and would probably put some W3C technologies out of the picture. Strategically, both KDE and Gnome should also "embrace and expand" to gain some market share. I doubt they will do it since the will to win is less strong than the will to "be against the devil empire". Nonetheless, if by some luck, leaders of these communities learned some strategic tricks and want to win some market share, the "embrace and expand" strategy can potentially transform the web as we know it. We would move from a model based on fat and "intelligent" servers and thin and "dumb" browsers to a distributed computing model. Obviously the latter is superior to the former. It unfortunate for the "mighty mainframe paradigm", but distributed computing is a far superior paradigm. What is the potential impact if such scenario occurs? a) Some players in the "application server" arena will suffer a lot :-) b) Users will experiment better "web" applications. c) The notion of enterprise applications will be transformed from fat server thin client to the notion of web application moving from a three tiers to two tiers architecture. As we know, the actual three tiers architecture is based on 1) the data sources (most of the time relational DB), 2) application servers (most of the time java based), 3) dumb terminals (a.k.a web browsers). A two tiers architecture would be based on data sources (providing XML streams or web applications in the future), client application execution environment. In the two tier environment, process is balanced between the client and the server. Also, asynchronous processing is now possible, hence allowing on-line and off-line processing more telecommute or mobile users. c) The notion of web browser will slowly disappear and be replaced with the notion of applications. Or the notion of browser will be now limited to text publication (until, someone put on the market an application able to publish content). d) W3C will find its influence limited to portable devices (no longer on desktop or laptop devices). Actually, these device vendors are not under Microsoft influence. These devices use SMIL, XHTML and java. It's very unlikely that they will embrace Microsoft new user interface declarative language. e) Universities will finally include XML based declarative programming in their curriculum. So yes, indeed, the impacts are potentially huge. Expect to see in the near future a lot of analyst report telling us the impact of longhorn. By the way, if someone needs an analyst, your humble servant is available and ready to discuss a good opportunity. Cheers Didier PH Martin http://didier-martin.com 
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