The Burgeoning Openly Owned Web

WIP… I need a user interface!

Problem:
How to present a rich user, expressive interface to a consumer in a user-friendly manner, which allows invocations of X services on a P2P network via a web interface.

Requirements:

• Run in any web browser and hence minimal dependency.
• Needs to be embedable within a web browser (the universal application!).
• That what is executed to present the UI needs to be verifiable e.g. via digital signatures.
• No remote code downloading once the UI has loaded. This presents security concerns and proxying issues.
• Standard based and compliant to that standard.
• Rich set of controls to express a business’ service offering
• A low developer learning curve and preferably an eclipse GUI builder, if not an XML schema.
• It’s got to look good - I don’t know about you but any application is sold within the first 2 minutes of it been used by a consumer. If it looks clunky, it’s not intuitive, not entertaining…. forget it!

Characteristics:
Reliable, Continuous, Portable, Versatile, Freedom, Internationalised (i18n), Pervasive.
Declarative & Imperative Offerings:

• XUL
• RCP/SWT
• XForms
• OpenLaszlo
• Java applets (Swing/AWT)
• Thinlets
• XHTML
• Flash
• XAML
• Rebol
• RIB
• And all those mentioned on the Open XUL alliance sourceforge project