Pages

February 4, 2006

Boxely, pt 1

Updated: Read Part 2.

Boxely is the custom user interface toolkit that underlies pretty much all of the current and upcoming desktop applications at AOL, including the AOL Suite, AIM Triton, AOL Explorer, AOL Safety&Security Center, among many others.

Its one of the pillars of the OCP.

Inside AOL, we also use the term to refer to our revamped style guide - which attempts to unify the look and feel of our desktop applications, web applications, and programming. For the most part, the idea is to make them feel like they're part of the same family, but to preserve the grammars of interaction that are appropriate for each context.

When I refer to Boxely, in this blog at least, I mean the desktop UI toolkit: markup, runtime, and gadget set. Now, before I dive into Boxely itself, I wanted to take a moment and talk about goals, with a little bit of history (for context) - which for me begins at the very start of 2004, shortly after I started.

I had a number of specific things I wanted to accomplish with UI, at a product level and an engineering level. First and foremost, as I've mentioned before, consumer applications are entirely about their UI. So I wanted to make it easier for us to develop desktop applications as well as enable us to build richer desktop applications. I think we've done well against those goals, though unfortunately, I'd view "rich" still as more potential than reality in terms of execution (i.e. Boxely enables us to do better things than we have so far done in our applications).

The good, and obvious, thing is that I wasn't alone in my thinking. We went through an evaluation period early here, looking pretty hard at XAML, XUL, MXML, and other mark-up driven syntaxes (go to
wikipedia for more info). We also looked at other alternatives, including extending FDO and more classically Win32 oriented UI toolkits like wxWidgets.

Boxely was one of the contenders. It was a homegrown UI toolkit, which started life in a sanctioned innovation program (now defunct) called ZOOM - it was intended as a sort of son-of-XUL (as are XAML and MXML). From there, it had been adopted as the underlying UI toolkit for a web authoring product (which also never saw the light of day).

(Minor aside - I've been on mini-crusade to either ship or kill projects that have been going on longer than I've been at AOL - 2 years now. I'm still not done. )

In any case, ultimately, Boxely won because:
(a) it was intended as a desktop UI toolkit, and so it enabled the appropriate grammars of interaction you expect from applications, as opposed to websites, or other.
(b) functionally, it was ahead of XAML, MXML, or XUL in enough of the critical axes: performance, richness, and runtime
(c) we had the source code - by that I mean the people, not the code :)
This also meant we had more control over its destiny.
(d) it allowed self-construction: building XML primitives out of other underlying primitives.
This is more or less the core of the whole set of next generation UI toolkits (post HTML, as it were) - I had this notion that people using Boxely would not need the documentation to Boxely itself; they'd just need the documentation to the "gadget" toolkit that was constructed out of Boxely for applications. For example, they wouldn't have to make an image tag and then add handlers for clicking to make it a button - they'd just type aolbutton, which would have been defined in an imported library. This was very important to me and one of the reasons that I was primarily focused on next-gen XML mark-up runtimes - I wanted to be able to layer our development to help us better leverage the scale of AOL. I also felt this layering would enable us to better support third party integrations.

To be fair, had we been able to complete the deal with Macromedia I attempted to engineer, things might have gone differently. So to those thinking NIH drove Boxely, I can say, "A little, but not really". Circumstance and serendipity, though, certainly did.

Next, I'll explore a bit more by discussing about the things I don't like about Boxely.

7 comments:

Twinsen said...

Alright. Let's hear it. What don't you like about Boxely?

Sree Kotay said...

Patience, FunFrock, its coming...

Anonymous said...

Drizzle
happy cat
angel's eyes
Time and love

Maize wedding gauze kerchief
Warm winter
Bamboo flute
Instant love

Anonymous said...

WoW Gold,WoW Gold,WoW Gold,WoW Gold,WoW Gold,WoW Gold,WoW Gold,WoW Gold,WoW Gold


Buy Wow Gold,Cheap WoW Gold,Cheap WoW Gold,wow gold for sale,cheapest wow gold,sell wow gold,wow gold sale,gold for wow,gold in wow,buy cheap wow gold,wow gold us,gold wow,conan gold,buy conan gold,cheap conan gold,cheapest conan gold,age of conan gold,buy age of conan gold,cheap age of conan gold,cheapest age of conan gold,aoc gold,buy aoc gold,cheap aoc gold,cheapest aoc gold,world of warcraft gold,buy world of warcraft gold,cheap world of warcraft gold,cheapest world of warcraft gold,sell world of warcraft gold,world of warcraft gold sale,aegwynn gold,buy aegwynn gold,cheap aegwynn gold,aegwynn us gold,buy aegwynn us gold,cheap aegwynn us gold,aegwynn alliance gold,aegwynn alliance us gold,Cairne Gold,WoW Cairne Gold,Buy Cairne Gold,Cheap Cairne Gold,Cairne US Gold,Cairne Alliance Gold,Cairne Horde Gold,WoW Gold Cairne Server,Cairne Gold WoW,Discount WoW Gold

wow power leveling,wow powerleveling,power leveling,powerleveling,wow powerleveling,wow power leveling,power level,powerlevel,cheap powerleveling,cheap power leveling,wow powerlevel,wow power level,powerleveling 60 70,powerleveling 1 70,power leveling 60 70,power leveling 1 70,rs powerleveling,rs power leveling,lineage 2 powerleveling,l2 power leveling

10000 wow gold buy 10000 wow gold cheap 10000 gold buy cheap 10000 gold 9000 wow gold buy 9000 wow gold buy cheap 9000 gold cheap 9000 gold 8000 wow gold buy 8000 wow gold buy cheap 8000 gold cheap 8000 gold 7000 wow gold buy 7000 wow gold buy cheap 7000 gold cheap 7000 gold 6000 wow gold buy 6000 wow gold buy cheap 6000 gold cheap 6000 gold 5000 wow gold buy 5000 wow gold buy cheap 5000 gold cheap 5000 gold 4000 wow gold buy 4000 wow gold buy cheap 4000 gold cheap 4000 gold 3000 wow gold buy 3000 wow gold buy cheap 3000 gold cheap 3000 gold 2000 wow gold buy 2000 wow gold buy cheap 2000 gold cheap 2000 gold 1000 wow gold Buy 1000 wow gold Buy cheap 1000 gold Cheap 1000 gold

Charmingirl said...

Wholesale lingerie directly from China?
As a famous brand and specialized manufacturer of sexy clothing in China. Charmingirl supply the international market with fashionable sexy lingerie and sexy costume since 2002. With advanced technology,all our products are of high quality. Now we have clients all around the world. Lingerie Wholesale and OEM are welcomed!
As a Lingerie Manufacturer, Charmingirl has standard workshop and production line, professional designers and experienced workers.
We do Wholesale Underwear,
Lingerie Wholesale, including corset and bustier,
Sexy Lingerie Wholesale, including bikini, underwear
Lingerie Wholesale, and Babydolls, Sexy Lingerie Wholesale, and
Sexy Lingerie Wholesale including sleepwear,clubwear.
Lingerie Wholesale from China: Lingerie China, you will find the
Leather Lingerie and PVC Lingerie, also you can buy
Christmas Costume and Xmas Lingerie
for your Christmas Lingerie Christmas day.
Our Wholesale center: Sexy Lingerie Wholesale can do Lingerie Wholesale online.
Halloween Costume,
also wholesale Adult Costume with fashion Babydoll Babydoll, and bra and panties Bra and Panties, Sexy Uniform Sexy Uniform is also our major products.

Anonymous said...

東邪西毒 文字 珊瑚 減肥 海豚 ballet past 窗簾 聖誕 英語 一個人 模特

Anonymous said...

A mere wow gold 500 block value wow gold (trifling to attain buy wow gold with the new buy wow gold strength to block cheap wow gold calculations) means cheap wow gold you will deal world of warcrft gold 100 damage to world of warcrft gold anyone who wow power leveling strikes you or power leveling is blocked attacking world of warcraft power leveling you.