What technologies inspired XWT?
Mozilla’s XUL/XPFE XWT was directly inspired by Mozilla’s XUL technology, which lets you mark up a user interface using XML. I like to think of XWT as “XUL light with SOAP and XMLRPC”, since it is much simpler and more lightweight than XUL, although it is less powerful than XUL since it lacks the ability to render arbitrary XML documents. A brief way of summarizing the differences would be that Mozilla/XUL sees GUIs as nothing more than a particular kind of document; XWT sees documents as nothing more than a particular kind of GUI. Conventional GUI frameworks see both as nothing more than a grid of pixels. Macromedia Flash While working for Reactivity, I did a contract for the now-defunct contact.com. We wrote a full-blown contact manager / address book entirely in Flash, which talked to a J2EE/Apache/Oracle server using HTTP POST (SOAP/XML-RPC were not yet mature). After leaving Reactivity, I spent a lot of time thinking about that project — Flash was the best tool available for the
