I built and managed (2009-2011) the XUL-based Elasticfox extension for Firefox that allowed users of EC2 to manage their compute resources on AWS. The extension pre-dated the AWS Console and introduced features such as resource tagging and search before they were part of the SDK.
The extension wouldn’t have been possible without XUL. In fact, it isn’t possible today. MDN documentation was really great even in those days, as was the community which answered a number of my questions. I was doing something really new, especially with calling into EC2 APIs, background refreshes, using Prefs.js to save tag information, etc., and the community was really responsive and supportive of my work. Quirks aside, my experience with XUL was great. Users truly appreciated the extension over the Java-based CLI, and a number of ideas (mine or those from the community) eventually made their way into the AWS Console.
I spent my last year at AWS working on the S3 Console using web technologies. I found XUL development to be easier than hacking CSS that year (circa 2010-11).
Edit: Added a note up top that this is my XUL story.
I built and managed (2009-2011) the XUL-based Elasticfox extension for Firefox that allowed users of EC2 to manage their compute resources on AWS. The extension pre-dated the AWS Console and introduced features such as resource tagging and search before they were part of the SDK.
The extension wouldn’t have been possible without XUL. In fact, it isn’t possible today. MDN documentation was really great even in those days, as was the community which answered a number of my questions. I was doing something really new, especially with calling into EC2 APIs, background refreshes, using Prefs.js to save tag information, etc., and the community was really responsive and supportive of my work. Quirks aside, my experience with XUL was great. Users truly appreciated the extension over the Java-based CLI, and a number of ideas (mine or those from the community) eventually made their way into the AWS Console.
I spent my last year at AWS working on the S3 Console using web technologies. I found XUL development to be easier than hacking CSS that year (circa 2010-11).
Edit: Added a note up top that this is my XUL story.