It occurred to me earlier that the styling solution I am proposing would actually support dynamically updated styles. Fundamentally, all styles are set via Component#getStyles(). This method returns an instance of StyleDictionary that, in turn, wraps a bean dictionary that wraps the skin. So, a put() to the style dictionary ultimately translates to a bean setter on the skin.
However, in practice, most styles are set via one of Component's setStyle() overloads. These methods ultimately result in a call to setStyles(Map<String, ?), which applies the styles from the map to the StyleDictionary. Since Maps fire events when properties change, a component instance could actually listen for change events on the map and update the style dictionary when a property changes. This would allow an application to update a style definition and have it automatically propagated to all components using that style. Again, I'm not sure how often this might be used in a real application, but it could be supported easily. The only thing I might want to add is a way to turn auto-updates on and off: <Label styles="$styles.myLabel" autoUpdateStyles="false"/> Anyways, I'm not entirely sure it is worth implementing, but it is something to think about. G
