Building apps with AOL's Boxely

One thing I didn't know about AIM Triton before now is that the whole thing is built on AOL's Boxely, a toolkit for building full-fledged desktop apps with JavaScript and XML. This probably sounds familiar, especially if you're familiar with Mozilla's XUL (which Firefox is built on) or Microsoft's Avalon/XAML. Boxely was created by notable Netscape and Firefox developer Joe Hewitt. Hewitt has since left AOL, but Boxely is alive and kicking, and is now available as a free download from AOL. If you want to quickly get an idea of what Boxely is capable of, I recommend downloading the OCP (Open Client Platform) Preview from the Boxely web site and checking out the ocpSamples folder. It contains a bunch of demo applications that show off its various features, from windowing to animation to graphics. In a the third of three posts (1, 2) about Boxely's genesis, Hewitt writes about what sets Boxely apart from XUL and Avalon, and I must say between that, the Boxely documentation, and the demo apps, I'm definitely going to be checking it out if I ever decide to write a Windows app. I am in whole-hearted agreement with Hewitt when he suggests to AOL, "If you were to port Boxely to OS X and Linux, and maybe, oh I don't know, open source the library, I think you'd have a real winner on your hands!"

Tags: aol, avalon, boxely, desktop, development, freeware, javascript, windows, xaml, xml, xul