I made a mistake in my post “Useful Resource #4 - Setting up ruby on rails on eclipse“. There is an eclipse update site link available in the RadRails site using which you can install rails as a plugin in eclipse. Thanks to Matt Kent @ radrails who pointed this to me. I missed it and touched my nose round about. Sorry about that.

Zool as it is pronounced is XML User interface Language. It was initially developed to support Mozilla applications like Firefox and Thunderbird but is picking up as a medium for representing UI details in web applications. There have been frameworks on specific technologies that address the presentation layer but not many to represent in the technology independent format like XML. A response from a web application is always an HTML which is also a form of XML but may not necessarily adhere to the XML rules. A XUL brings back UI information that is parsed on the client end by a XUL runtime environment like XULRUnner which produces a desktop kind of an application using the native API. This breaks away from the traditional way of displaying contents within a browser restricting to UI tied to HTML.

The Mozilla platform extensively uses XUL and the Firefox browser extensions are created using XUL. Even though there are limitations at this point of writing to make a XUL based web application, it would be matter of time it gets to that stage. Once that happens web applications will output XUL instead of HTML and the client browser has the XUL runtime environment that can parse and run it. Right now there is one application Mozilla Amazon Browser (MAB) that has been developed with the help of XUL. MAB allows you to search through Amazon for books and add it to shopping cart and has many more features. You can access MAB only through Mozilla Firefox.