Remembering the Future

A former colleague/collaborator, Paul Colton, has just released a new product called Xamlon, which provides a simple XAML implementation on top of .NET 1.1 and the Windows Forms framework.  For those not familiar with Paul, he founded LiveSoftware, and created JRun, the first commercial Java Servlet engine -- he and his team went on to invent what became JSP and JSP Tag Libraries (what they called Dynamic Taglets), and CF_Anywhere, a CFML processor on top of their Java Tag framework.  Paul left Allaire after we acquired LiveSoftware, and has been playing around with a lot of ideas, but this one seems pretty cool! 

XAML is the new XML-based user interface programming language that will be part of the Windows Longhorn release in 2006.  Paul clearly liked XAML and thought that developers would be interested in developing with it (albeit much smaller/simpler in scale and richness) today.  This will be an interesting project to track.

XAML is a very powerful system, and Longhorn, Microsoft's next generation Windows, is one of the most exciting things to ever come from Microsoft. XAML has one "catch"—it is currently only part of Avalon, which is the presentation layer of Longhorn. Many capabilities of XAML are tied directly to Longhorn, but on the other hand, many of the concepts could, in theory, be applied to today's .NET Framework on today's Windows platforms.