Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

XMLUI

blog.jonudell.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 345 posts

Re: XMLUI

#111

Post by thechao »

sheepscreek wrote: post #25
cheschire wrote: post #3

No mention of XSLT? Feels like it would be highly relevant since many folks have not considered transforming or styling XML since those days, and would be interested in understanding the huge leap from that to this. And given Jon Udell has written about XSLT before[0], I'm sure this was an intentional decision. Not sure I understand it though. 0: https://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/08/13/udell.html

The performance of available XSLT translation engines would be a big consideration for me, especially in a hot-reload context to support fast iterations.

That was my first thought: no XSLT 3 engine that I know of keeps an in-memory object that supports iterative retemplating on diff changes to the source. I think the closest to this is in the functional communities and their lenses. Given how "far" XSLT can reach through a document via Xpath, I don't think it's an easy-to-solve problem.

Re: XMLUI

#112

Post by sp0rk »

jeroenhd wrote: post #104
mrweasel wrote: post #99

Using VB as a reference seems incorrect. Much of the appeal of Visual Basic, and Delphi, was the UI builder. Just click a button to create new project and you already had a window ready to go. Drag and drop in components, click buttons and what-not to wire up functionality. The barrier to entire was so incredibly low, having to edit XML files feels miles away from that ease of use. That being said Visual Basic also c…

Before Compose took over as the new direction for Android app development, the Android Studio designer IDE had a very VB6-style designer where you could drag and drop components, while the underlying UI files were all XML based. The callback generation wasn't as easy as with VB, and different phone sizes meant you had to deal with resizing (which VB applications usually just didn't bother with), but the experience wa…

> These days you've got Gambas for a free and open source VB, including the terrible language, but in my experience the looks are a bit off when you design on one desktop environment and run the application on another.

There is also Lazarus[1], which uses Pascal but feels closer to what I remember of the VB6 experience.

1: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Re: XMLUI

#113

Post by DonHopkins »

agnokapathetic wrote: post #31

reminds me of Macromedia MXML (used in Flash, Coldfusion and Flex)! https://github.com/apache/royale-asjs/blob/develop/examples/...

OpenLaszlo was an eariler, more powerful, more fun, open source alternative to FLEX. It's obsolete now that Flash is dead, but I really got in the "zone" with it.

Residential, Commercial and Industrial zones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/laszlo/m...

Here's some stuff about OpenLaszlo and other related ui systems:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21841054

DonHopkins on Dec 20, 2019 | parent [–]

My remark was just an old Java joke I repurposed for Ant! "Java is a DSL for taking large XML files and converting them to stack traces." -Andrew Back

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/eaqgk/java_is_...

But in all seriousness:

OpenLaszlo used XML with embedded JavaScript in a way that let you extend XML by defining your own tags in XML+JavaScript. I've done a lot of work with it, and once you make your peace with XML (which seemed like a prudent thing to do at the time), it's a really productive enjoyable way to program! But that's more thanks to the design of OpenLaszlo itself, rather than XML.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLaszlo

OpenLaszlo (which was released in 2001) inspired Adobe Flex (which was released in 2004), but Flex missed the point of several of the most important aspects of OpenLaszlo (first and foremost being cross platform and not locking you into Flash, which was the entire point of Flex, but also the declarative constraints and "Instance First Development" and the "Instance Substitution Principal", as defined by Oliver Steele).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Flex

https://web.archive.org/web/20190318072102/https://blog.oste...

The mantle of constraint based programming (but not Instance First Development) has been recently taken up by "Reactive Programming" craze (which is great, but would be better with a more homoiconic language that supported Instance First Development and the Instance Substitution Principle, which are different but complementary features with a lot of synergy). The term "Reactive Programming" describes a popular old idea: what spreadsheets had been doing for decades.

OpenLaszlo and Garnet (a research user interface system written by Brad Myers at CMU in Common Lisp) were exploring applying automatic constraints to user interface programming. Garnet started in the early 1990's. Before that, Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad explored constraints in 1963, and inspired the Visual Geometry Project in the mid 1980's and The Geometer's Sketchpad in 1995.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_programming

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/garnet/www/garnet-home....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad

http://math.coe.uga.edu/TME/Issues/v10n2/4scher.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geometer%27s_Sketchpad

I've written more about OpenLaszlo and Garnet:

What is OpenLaszlo, and what's it good for?

https://web.archive.org/web/20160312145555/http://donhopkins...

>Declarative Programming: Declarative programming is an elegant way of writing code that describes what to do, instead of how to do it. OpenLaszlo supports declarative programming in many ways: using XML to declare JavaScript classes, create object instances, configure them with automatic constraints, and bind them to XML datasets. Declarative programming dovetails and synergizes with other important OpenLaszlo techniques including objects, prototypes, events, constraints, data binding and instance first development.

Constraints and Prototypes in Garnet and Laszlo

https://web.archive.org/web/20160405015129/http://www.donhop...

>Garnet is an advanced user interface development environment written in Common Lisp, developed by Brad Meyers (the author of the article). I worked for Brad on the Garnet project at the CMU CS department back in 1992-3.

More about TCL/Tk, OpenLaszlo, Garnet, constraint programming, history of constraints: Coco KVO, Objective Smalltalk constraints, Sutherland, Sketchpad, Geometers Sketchpad, Knowledge Representation frames, push vs pull constraints, etc:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17360883

Re: XMLUI

#114

Post by judell »

sheepscreek wrote: post #17

I am super excited about the stuff we cannot see - I have a feeling the quality of engineering here is going to be solid + backed by consideration for the WYSIWYG programmers. Developing in Visual Basic is how programming became accessible for me as a kid. I could do stuff with ease that had seemed like magic and completely out of reach without C++ and complex pointer gymnastics. So thankful to the movement and I sin…

We would love to know how that goes.

Re: XMLUI

#116

Post by toolslive »

criddell wrote: post #16
yoz-y wrote: post #8

As a programmer I found that all no-or-less-code approaches break up sooner than one would expect. Eventually I chosen to always use the programming language itself for data fetching, looping and leave the templating (lit html in my case) to just passing in the data structures.

I've also seen examples that are pushed way further than I thought possible. I'm thinking about some of the things people do in Excel.

IIRC, for a long time in the late 90s, Fedex was glued together with spreadsheets.

Re: XMLUI

#117

Post by airstrike »

cluckindan wrote: post #108
airstrike wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spreadsheet is a form of programming, so you can build anything there.

Let’s see an HTTP server in an Excel sheet.

That's a disingenuous take. You could write one, but it won't be allowed to connect to anything other than itself because Excel doesn't give it the network stack or IO it needs. Unless you use VBA, of course.

See https://spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai/index.html

Re: XMLUI

#118

Post by waltbosz »

general1726 wrote: post #53

You can also use WPF/Avalonia (.NET) or MAUI (.NET) You will see why XML for UI is beautiful but nightmare to debug if something is off and crashing.

Maybe I just didn't understand it but to me WPF felt like it was designed by an insane person.

Re: XMLUI

#119

Post by im3w1l »

djha-skin wrote: post #63
criddell wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also seen examples that are pushed way further than I thought possible. I'm thinking about some of the things people do in Excel.

In 2010 I was working for a student computer support shop. We had web developers building our own ticketing system. In those days, I was told that everything in the UI was just tables. It was the only way they could get enough control on UI elements before div tags became widely spread.

Html tables are very different from excel tables. Fundamentally html tables were used because rows are a good way to split up the page vertically (you could have one row for the header, one for the content one for the footer). And columns are good for splitting it up horizontally (you could have one column for the side panel, and one for the content, and the last one for an obnoxious blinking ad).

Re: XMLUI

#120

Post by DonHopkins »

j1elo wrote: post #102
eyelidlessness wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this is a reinvention of XHTML. It’s definitely closer in spirit to XUL, but seems different enough still that I wouldn’t call it reinvention. What seems particularly novel about this is that it’s taken the compositional approach of modern UI component libraries, and distilled it down to units of composition that can express a lot of behavior and logic declaratively . At least at a glance, that’s an imp…

Speaking of expressing a UI declaratively, and composition with web components... as a former Qt/QML dev, I always felt like Web innovations of the last decade are just rehashes of the inspirations and ideas behind what Qt's QML started offering already since 2010. Things like CSS Grid, which was a great and celebrated new toy in 2017, but as foreigner from the Web world, I still remember how I read those news and di…

XULRunner's initial release was in 2006.

OpenLaszlo was released in 2001.

Garnet was released in the early 90's.

Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (aka Robot Draftsman) was created in 1963, and inspired the Visual Geometry Project in the mid 1980's and The Geometer's Sketchpad in 1995

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627569

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLaszlo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geometer%27s_Sketchpad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad

Post reply on HN