Web Applications with Mozilla's XUL?

An Anonymous Coward's idle musings inspires this query: "Web-based applications are a hot topic, right now, but sometimes HTML is too simple for your applications. Using a cross-plataform, more powerful and efficient UI like Mozilla's XUL would be great." XUL is more an interface description language rather than an application language, as it still uses Javascript to handle application processing. It would be interesting to see if future browsers (or future versions of existing browsers) would add XUL bindings for other languages like PHP, Perl, or even Visual Basic if such a thing interests you.

If you're going proprietary...

[Lally Singh]

If you're planning to require the user to have a specific piece of software on their machine already, why not give them Java web start?
Then you can use something your developers are more likely to know. Besides, the more popular the technology, the less expensive the developers...

perl and python XPCOM bindings...

[jjn1056]

Activestate (www.activestate.com) is working on this. They actually have the python bindings out in beta form, but I don't knoe what happened to the perl bindings. They actually use the the python bindings to build their IDE, called 'Komodo', which is built on top of Mozilla, and I think uses Scintilla for text processing.