Re: Missing the point, really missing the point...

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Re: Missing the point, really missing the point...
by Datschge on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @07:22

"to ensure that the GUI always resembles the current human interface policies of the desktop environment"

This sounds more like wishful thinking to me, unless the 'human interface policies' are flexible like bubble gum themselves or the flexibility of creating GUI's (not their content) using XAML is fundamentally restricted. And many of the XAML GUI examples I saw didn't look usable but hideous. Please refer me to some documentation clearing up how the separation of GUI and content you like to emphasize so much should work.

"If big corporations (and developers in general) choose XAML/Avalon to write their applications now"

Is that already possible? I think the whole development environment and framework for it to be really applicable is by far not usable in production use as of now, and that will only change when Longhorn is officially released (which will be in several years).

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Re: Missing the point, really missing the point...
by Anonymous coward on Friday 26/Mar/2004, @09:19

> This sounds more like wishful thinking to me

Yes, it may be just complete vaporware and/or poorly implemented stuff... But it seems that Microsoft is really working in that field - while the free software world is completely unprepared, and often underestimates XAML/Avalon effects.

> Please refer me to some documentation clearing up how the separation of GUI and
> content you like to emphasize so much should work.

There's no single reference (at least, I haven't found it yet): the plan can be understood by looking at the whole XAML/Longhorn scenario. If there was a clear explanation of Microsoft plans, maybe we wouldn't be discussing whether Rik's article underestimated XAML/Avalon consequences :-)

Some interesting stuff, however, is here: http://longhornblogs.com/

And most of the consequences are quite easy to understand: once you have such a XML-based GUI design system in place, integrated with the whole .NET framework, developers won't have to care e.g. about widget positioning and spacing: CSS-like and/or XLS-like transformations may take care of it, depending on the current theme and/or human interface policies. It may not help in *all* the cases (it's always possible to write bad GUIs and bad applications), but it *does* give an additional value that free software can't offer (yet).

One of the actual examples of how XAML/Avalon could work is given by... XUL (that uses the Mozilla rendering engine, Gecko, to apply CSS-like styles and transformations to XML-defined GUIs).

XAML is something like XUL, but applied to native widgets and themes, with a complete system integration (via the .NET framework) and a broader support for scripting languages (while XUL only supports Javascript, XAML supports all the languages of the .NET framework). In other words: XAML/Avalon are nothing new, but it promises to be very powerful and (as of today) free software competitors simply don't exist. See the Edd Dumbill's article I've pointed out for further details: http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog/contents/2004/03/03-gnomeui/read

> > If big corporations (and developers in general) choose XAML/Avalon to write
> > their applications now"

Sorry, I was unclear. XAML is not production quality, yet - but corporations and developers may start now their planning abut thecnologies to be used in future projects (and that's the whole point of the articles being published on MSDN: they want to influence these choices).

We can't answer to these articles just by saying "I've done the same with Qt and KDevelop", because it really takes into account one of the points (the RAD issue), and completely misses the long-term maintainability and system integration points.

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