Back in my February 2004 Developer Day slides, I promoted the idea of using Eclipse to create a XUL application builder, with direct-manipulation graphical layout construction and editing, project management wizards, etc.
Although a few people expressed interest and even did some hacking (the MozCreator project being the most conspicuous example, although not Eclipse-based), no one actually created an Eclipse project and built on its Graphical Editor Framework to realize a XUL app-builder.
The good news this week is Open Laszlo and IBM releasing the Eclipse IDE for Laszlo. LZX is cool, and similar in spirit, and in many ways in flesh, to XUL.
So the thought occurs: why not patch the Eclipse IDE for Laszlo to support XUL as an alternative target language, and Firefox (or any new-style XUL app, soon enough unified via XULRunner) as the target runtime? Any takers?
/be