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The Boxely UI Toolkit is finally available to the public! Congratulations go to the whole team.

Boxely is a declarative XML UI toolkit much like Flex. It is the brainchild of Joe Hewitt, the man who brought us FireBug. It was inherited from Joe by a small team at AOL, and through months of hard work they have been making it into their tool of choice for building the next generation of AOL apps. If you have used AIM Triton, you’re running Boxely, and AIM is sitting on your hard drive as a combination of flat files: Box files (like MXML), XML stylesheets (like CSS), javascript behavior scripts (like AS3), and external resources like PNGs. You can author Boxely apps with any editor, and the principles of the language like data binding, styling, behavior attaching, SMIL style animation constructs, and shared libraries of components, are applicable to other XML UI toolkits, so I believe the skills are somewhat interchangeable.

AOL has been developing this tool for its own internal use, but it’s fantastic to see that AOL is giving it away to the public. You should be able to build some pretty cool apps with it in a short time. It seems AOL likes owning their own technologies: .Net and XAML are comparable to the Open Client Platform — which Boxely runs on — and Boxely, yet AOL invested months of hard work into developing their own technologies. I don’t think they’re truly made to compete with other platforms, but perhaps to allow AOL to decide the direction they move in? It will be interesting to see what the development community will make of, and make with, Boxely.

Oh, and I care about all this because I worked on the Boxely team for a few months at AOL. (Too bad my pong demo didn’t make it into the deliverable, ha!) So congrats to all!