In Search of an Application...

Lately I've been thinking about starting yet another project. This one needs a rich GUI that runs as a thin client, as well as more limited support for a web browser (or so I thought initially). I've gone through a bit of an eye-opening exercise while looking at the implementation, and I thought I'd record the line of exploration just in case someone else is looking at the same sort of problem. Maybe this will save a little time.

The original idea was to replace an interesting but quirky application that will remain nameless. It's a fairly large project that implements its own thin client. As I started looking at it, I realized that a lot of what it does is more related to providing the application framework than the application itself. Sometimes I still suffer from the closed-source way of thinking, and I soon began listing requirements for my own framework. A few minutes into defining my XML markup for laying out simple interfaces, I remembered that there is already a pretty good standard for that: XUL.

At the time I was thinking of using GTK+ for the GUI. I've grown somewhat fond of various GTK+ applications that I've installed over the years. These applications have offered nice rich interfaces and have been pretty reliable. A lot of them are written in Python, and the bridge between GTK+ and Python, PHP-GTK is the way to go.

The search is for something that lets me bridge XUL and GTK, be it in PHP or Python. This leads me to Gul, a fairly complete implementation of XUL for PHP-GTK.

Let's try adding the GTK to PHP. I go to the PHP-GTK site and try to figure out whether to download the binary package or the binary extensions package, read confusing and incomplete install notes, search about a bit, and as best I can tell, the easiest way to run PHP-GTK on Windows is to install a complete copy of PHP with the GTK extensions. This truly fails the cross-platform and easy-to-install tests — I can manage it, but an end user? No way. Then I take a look at Gul 2.0: lots of procedural code that relies on passing things through obscure globals with two characters. Next!

On to Python. Searches for XUL and Python lead, at best, to half-developed projects dating from 2004. Not good. Now the thinking is that maybe a fairly basic XUL module for Python won't be that much work. I look more deeply into XUL. Obviously, it's pretty capable, after all it's the base for Firefox and Thunderbird. But this makes the scope of a full implementation quite a lot bigger than I'd like.

Maybe there's something in XULRunner. Wow. It doesn't take much looking around to realize that XULRunner is pretty compelling. It's obviously got the GUI with a full XUL implementation. It's got scripting in Javascript, Python, even Java. It has network interfaces and support for XML-RPC and SOAP. It's extensible: all the features that make it easy to plug extensions into Firefox are part of XULRunner. It's got localization and custom skins. It's got an integrated web browser. That's about 90% of the core requirements and several bonuses right there.

Now the kicker: if you have Firefox 3.x installed, then you have XULRunner installed. Firefox knows how to do its own updates, which means the framework updates seamlessly too. Perfect.

So that's it. Forget GTK+, nice as it is. XULRunner is a fantastic way to do GUI application development.

Now all I need is a good way to map objects back to a relational database...