NAME

XUL-Node - server-side XUL for Perl

SYNOPSIS

package XUL::Node::Application::HelloWorld; # XUL-Node Hello World use XUL::Node;
use base 'XUL::Node::Application';

sub start { Window Label value => 'Hello World!' }

1;

DESCRIPTION

XUL-Node is a rich user interface framework for server-based Perl applications. It includes a server, a UI framework, and a Javascript XUL client for the Firefox web browser. Perl applications run inside a POE server, and are displayed in a remote web browser.

The XUL::Node POD has more information.

FEATURES

• Develop user interfaces as you would using frameworks such as Tk or WxPerl, but deploy to Firefox web clients with no special security permissions or downloads
• Support for almost all of the XUL, see TODO for unsupported features
• Client-server communication is done through HTTP
• Page never reloads, only UI deltas are sent over the wire
• Almost a 1-1 correspondence with the XUL DOM API, with minimal Perl syntactic sugar- if you you know XUL, and you know Perl, you can program in XUL-Node
• 18 examples, including the XUL Periodic Table of Elements, demonstrating the usage of every widget, attribute, and event
• Unicode and BiDi support
• Lots of unit tests, very high coverage

PREREQUISITES

XUL-Node requires Perl 5.8.2, Firefox 2.0, and the following modules, which can be obtained from CPAN:

     Scalar::Util
     LWP
     MIME::Types
     POE
     POE::Component::Server::HTTPServer
     Digest::MD5
     Aspect

If you install XUL-Node from the CPAN shell, these modules will, if necessary, be installed automatically as well.

INSTALLATION

Install this distribution using the standard build process for Perl

modules

      perl Makefile.PL
      (...maybe answer two questions...)
      make
      make test
      make install

Or you could use the CPAN shell, as described in the "CPAN" module documentation.

During installation you can provide a port and a server root directory path for the XUL-Node server when prompted, or you can just accept the defaults.

Several Perl modules, one script (the XUL-Node server), and a server root directory (to be served by the web server) will be installed.

You can then run the server using the command:

xul-node-server

And point your Firefox web browser at the following URL to see the demos, assuming you chose the default port:

http://localhost:8077

AVAILABILITY

XUL-Node has been uploaded to the CPAN.

AUTHOR

Ran Eilam <eilara@cpan.org>. Please mail me bugs and suggestions.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2003-2005 Ran Eilam. All rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.