Erlang for desktop applications?

[Mikael Karlsson]

One way to go with XUL is not to use XPCOM but to load your XUL-application 
from the webbserver and to handle events in a AJAX fashion (using the JSON 
support on Yaws maybe :-).  This means you do not have to install anything on 
your client side, except Firefox. I think start times for such applications 
are OK, if they are not too complex and considering that Firefox is already 
up and running.
 
If you still wan't to build XPCOM bindings one way to go could be to use 
Erlangs Corba support, since the interfaces to XPCOM is specified in XPIDL,
a Corba style interface, and since there are some bridges:
http://www.cmiss.org/ReleaseCenter/xpcorba
http://xpcom2corba.sunsite.dk/

Generally I think you could do some really nice applications using Firefox XUL 
and a (Yaws) server. The RDF support that comes with Firefox and XUL is also 
something really interesting. See the RDF tutorial on:
http://www.xulplanet.com/
for instance.

Regards
Mikael

Wed 23 August 2006 06:47 Roberto Saccon wrote:
> A few minutes of further research revealed that I missed an important
> thing:
>
> XUL bindings for Erlang (and they need to go into mozilla trunk, which
> is very unrealistic for the not-so-far future)
>
> see link below for an example of Python XUL bindings (which will be
> available for Firefox 3):
>
> http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/008865.html
>
> Possible workaround: Use Javascript for GUI stuff and go from there
> via Erlang XPCOM bindings.
>