Building apps with AOL's Boxely

Filed under: Developer, Windows, Freeware

Building apps with AOL's Boxely

by Jordan Running (RSS feed) Oct 25th 2006 at 7:10PM

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, javascript, windows, xaml, xml, xul

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Gary said 1:54AM on 10-26-2006

The Triton and Boxely links in the post are the same.

stuart said 5:46PM on 11-01-2006

Looks like AOL have taken down the extire boxely site:(

I do not know if this is the reason, but it may well be because the license users where forced to agree to where extremely restrictive (the greenhouse license) and the team which released it did not intend for that.

Hopefully they will either update the license or move it out of the greenhouse.

larry said 3:48PM on 11-05-2006

The Boxely site at www.boxely.com is up again.

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Building apps with AOL's Boxely