Xul Dev

Xul Dev is a project for a free visual IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to design XUL graphical interface and build software in any programming language.

The program is a binary executable for Windows or Linux. In the future we will compile it into PHP to run it on a server and use it as a Web application also.

Description

Visual Gui designer
Toolbar to create a windows and put widgets on it.
 A property panel to define attributes and to associate functions to events.

Editor
The use of Scintilla is planned. This will allow syntax-highlighting for any programming language.

Class manager
From this panel, you can select a class, method, attribute.

File manager
Panel to select files.

RDF interface
The program itself uses XUL for the graphical interface and Scriptol or C++ for the programming language.
The configuration and data files are in the RDF format. Tools will be provided to convert text files or XML file to Rdf.

Components used by the program

• XUL is a XML subset for graphical user interface design.
  
• JavaScript is the language for XUL interactions. It may be inserted directly into Scriptol source, enclosed between ~~ signs.
  
• XULRunner is the runtime required to display the XUL interface. Alternatively you can display it with Firefox.
• XPCom is the interface to XUL, allowing linking binary extensions written in any language. If you wish add C++ code to the project it have to be interfaced by XPCom.

Building the XUL IDE

Xul Dev is currently at early stage of development.
Feature planned in next stages are these:
- Completing the graphical interface.
- Creating and loading RDF files.
- Using an external text editor. This may requires a compilation of XPCom.

The project

• Description. Details of the current stage of development.
• Last changes.
• The project at Sourceforge.
• Download at Sourceforge.