The XUL app I'm working on is continuing splendidly. I've been learning a lot about how to position these things, and come up with
a pretty nice looking layout and a reasonable tab system. I'm pretty sure the 2 people at the client who might use this will be
blown away, as planned.
I did hit a few snags:
- Overlays don't seem to work.
I was trying to get one overlay that had all the script tags, effectively importing all my libraries.
Right now I'm just copy/pasting, but maybe I'll get a response from my forum post on
Overlays in remote XUL
- Trees don't work in
grids.
Don't know why, but if I copy/paste the tree to be outside a grid, it works fine. This actually worked out fine,
because a tree wasn't the right thing to use anyway.
- Iframe caching is a son-of-a-bitch
A common way to display multiple interfaces in XUL is to load up an iframe, and point it at another XUL file.
So, I have a main page, and a user action loads up an iframe. I was changing the file loaded in the iframe, and
it was just being cached incredibly agressively. After awhile I restarted Firefox and that fixed it. There's
some way to turn caching off in the preferences, but I just pull up the file I want to mess with directly, and that
solves my issue.
-
Binding RDF to a menulist has funky behavior
When binding to an empty list, it rendered as a dropdown list with a blank entry selected, and then when you
clicked the little arrow to select from the list, it showed only the options from the RDF. It's not refreshing
properly somehow, and not respecting the menuitem.selected property. For now, I used
a radiogroup instead, and that worked out fine,
but in the next chunk of functionality, a dropdown list is going to be the friendliest thing for the user.
Overall, I really like it. When I have to go back to work on an HTML/C# project, I lament the lack of box model. XUL isn't perfect, but
its a lot better than HTML. Also, I've been hanging out on #xul recently, and that's been really neat. I'm starting to see some familiar
names, and I've gotten past the lurking phase, now offering advice as well as asking. Also kinda cool is the reason I started lurking on
#xul is becasue of a comment left by on my blog, which
led to another tutorial covering the same topic, which had the irc information in the footer. Tonight on #xul I had a nice conversation about
closures and javascript vs other languages with that same guy. Outside of Acceleration, I've never really taken part in any kind of
developer community, and its really nice.