I, like many others, am frustrated by the state of web GUI's for rank-and-file B-to-B apps. We have fond memories of rich desktop applications along with relatively simple design tools that allowed us to focus on business logic instead of GUI/interaction details.

After exploring this issue for many moons, I've tentatively decided that the best path to such is to collectively build an OSS "GUI browser" using Java and it's GUI libraries. Communication between server and browser would be via GuiMachineLanguage or XML (because XML is acceptable and parsers are common, not necessarily because its the best protocol). I am not fan of Java, but Java's GUI libraries are '''available, fairly rich, and reasonably-well road-tested'''. Starting from scratch would take at least 3 years until it reaches usable maturity, and likely longer if initial interest is low.

The browser will allow most of the processing to be on the server (for behavior not easily specified declaratively), but also permit browser-side applets or scripts for snappier user-side response. Whether only Java applets will be allowed or other languages depends a lot on inter-language integration issues.

The back-up to this plan is to build a browser out of TclTk. DOM standards are an oxymoron that are too easy to be hijacked by MS, so I've dismissed AJAX.

Note that there are several OSS XML-to-Java projects out there that perhaps could perhaps be hijacked for this. The few I looked at appeared unnecessarily complex or too tied to the Java language.

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See also: WebGuiWikiPoll, GoogleWebKit (Java -> HtmlDomJsCss)
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CategoryUserInterface, CategoryWebDesign, CategoryInternet

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