It seems like pretty interesting stuff. Or it did until I clicked something that turned out to be at devedge.netscape.com; experienced Safari users wil know what happened next there. :-(

Anyway, we have an XML-based system for generating lightweight applications written in Javascript (or anything else?). Now, I think I've seen that before somewhere. :-)

Now XUL has the key problem that, as a toolkit, it seems to be the anti-Tk; you have to write a surprising number of lines of code to do anything. That said, it did truly embrace the notion of XML + events/scripting + CSS = applications, and I suspect that is the winning equation.

konfabulator seems to have decided *not* to be the anti-Tk, which I think is absolutely key. That said, I'm not sure what their plans are for the use of CSS, or whether they will support what I think will become *the* standard event set by sheer force of will and inertia, namely what the w3c is planning for DOM3. Also, I noted that some of the events seemed gratuitously named (e.g., "onGainFocus").

Another problem is that Konfabulator has apparently decided just to live in what I guess I could call the "single window really simple widget space". It's easy to see all kinds of cool very simple widgets you could make with this, but tough to see how you are going to use very easily it do anything evem slightly more complicated. So it looks like you can use form() to toss up a dialog box of some kind, but it doesn't look like you can do much of anything to format it nicely or include a textentry field in a main window.

So I guess my greatest fear here is that people will really quickly run up against konfabulator's limitations, but use weird silly hacks to get around them. And the lack of CSS means that I'm going to be spaghettifying a lot of code to get a consistent look.

Now, I presume there is some major hope on this front that konfabulator (or another tool) could eventually use webcore and javascriptcore to handle all of the ickiness of styling XML, and that the konfabulator people will, with sufficient money from their shareware fees, expand their system to handle a wider variety of things.

Does that make sense?

So, does that mean that you finished the game?

I've been working on a Konfabulator widget for a few days now; this site answers a couple of different questions I had had on the subject. Extremely well written tutorial!

Konfabulator is well-executed but the strategy is questionable. $25 for the run-time prevents from achieving any penetration whatsoever, certainly not nearly enough to attract developers.

What I'd like to see is a JavaScript/DHTML library that facilitates the development of rich interfaces in a normal web browser widget. Sort of like versalent.com but less enterprise-oriented.

>Konfabulator is well-executed but the strategy is
>questionable. $25 for the run-time prevents from
>achieving any penetration whatsoever, certainly not nearly
>enough to attract developers.

I have this odd feeling that they might be hoping for somebody to buy them out. One thing I just realized is that they really do only mean to cover a very limited piece of what should be fertile ground for "do it yourself in Aqua" software. There's Applescript Studio and Camelbones and such, but nothing that leverages things like XML and CSS. I mean, what I really want is the event-handling model of Applescript, some of the nice things that XML and CSS can do, and a language that is *not* based on HyperTalk. So far, nothing much...that I'm aware of. Maybe I'm just missing something.

> What I'd like to see is a JavaScript/DHTML library that
> facilitates the development of rich interfaces in a normal
> web browser widget. Sort of like versalent.com but less
> enterprise-oriented.

I used to work for a .com company called WebOS, writting exactly what you're speaking of. We even finished it, but the company went belly up. I've been trying to contact the founders to see if they would release the project as open source, but no luck yet.

The company refocused on it's online office suite, and can be found at HyperOffice.com. If you can get any information from them it would be outstanding.