XUL Applications

[Dan Falconer]

I've got an application that is at a crucial turning point, and I'm considering the possibility of using an XUL-based client application versus a server application.  There's benefits and drawbacks for both, and application speed is pretty important to me: I just upgraded my webserver so that response times dropped from ~2.5s down to 150-300ms.

I know some of you have experience with creating/maintaining XUL or XUL-Runner client applications, so I'm interested in your thoughts.  Are there benefits to using this client application instead of a web-based approach?  Can the server define the interface as in a web browser?  How hard is it to get started, and is there an IDE for building XUL-based apps?  What about client-side caching (such as storing a local database)?

Any help or insight would be very much appreciated.  Thanks in advance!

--
Best Regards,


Dan Falconer
http://www.CrazedSanity.com || http://www.Buzzkill.org

[Dan Falconer]

Does anyone have any insight on this?

I've been looking at implementing SiteFusion to facilitate building XUL applications (they've got some interesting apps in their examples page).  There's a lot of information there, if any of you are interested... I'd really appreciate any feedback on this, even if you're not an expert on XUL.