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XULrunner vs. Dashboard

Daniel Glazman says:

Forget Konfabulator, forget Dashboard, forget Tcl/Tk. XULrunner will kill them all. As usual, it’s not planned to kill them. It’ll be just a side effect of the existence of XULrunner.

I agree, but with an exception. Konfabulator, and Dashboard have much better management of widgets than XULrunner appears to have (I’ve yet to see any documentation planning something better). XULrunner manages widgets more like Java. It simply doesn’t. It relies on the OS to do so. It’s purely a runtime.

If XULrunner could be run in a Dashboard type mode (run multiple widgets, background, be rather graceful and beautiful), and good installation methods to add widgets and manage them. It would be a killer app. Especially since it’s so portable and powerful.

But as a runtime (which is essentially what XULrunner is at this time), it’s not quite a killer. It’s apple’s and oranges.

I’d personally love to see the ability to run XULrunner in a “Dashboard mode” so that it managed XUL based widgets similar to how one of those other products manage widgets. That really would be an impressive feat. Perhaps that would be a great XULrunner app for someone to write. A portable, fast, lean XUL based Dashboard app?

3 replies on “XULrunner vs. Dashboard”

i actually disagree. sadly people starts to see everything nails when they have the hammer at hand. i actually find original author’s sentences “wishful thinking” if not arrogant.
i do not know how Xul runner have the power of ruling out a far-more mature products like Java with Swing – SWT, Python etc with – GTK or similar native GUI mechanisms.

I guess what you want would be a xulrunner app doing something dashboard-like and then use the extension manager for that app to install dashboard-like widgets.

Shouldn’t be all that hard to do.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “widgets”… XULRunner as originally conceived isn’t really meant to run little dashboard-like widgets, it’s meant to run complex rich-client applications. It is not impossible to do dashboard-like things from within xulrunner, and we are investigating the possibility, but it’s not the core plan.

The problem with all of the large frameworks like GTK/Java is that it is very hard to deploy an application with the full runtime, because of either the size or the dependencies of the runtime.

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