Pat, Those are all good and valid points you are raising here. Doc: Better documentation - sure go and write it - we will gladly insert it into the next distribution. This project is still at an very early stage; started about two month ago. Swixml is no quick and easy GUI builder. Developers deciding to use Swixml need to have a solid understanding of the underlying javax.swing objects and Widgets. All this does not mean that we don't need documentation - but currently we are working on finalizing the 1.0 API rather then "getting started" guides. Anyone with some technical writing skills however is very welcome to jump in.
Requirements: You don't have to overwrite SwingEngine, this was used to make the samples as compact as possible. Look at the Applet sample code, which doesn't overwrite SwingeEngine but uses composition instead. Providing public Actions member variables with anonymous inner classes implementations to handle events creates compact and readable code. However, you can also use ActionCommands to avoid having public Action fields. The idea with the action map was actually discussed but dismissed for the 1.0 release. However, we are going to re-visit this issue after 1.0 is finalized. We experimented with all kinds of ways to do event handling. the public Actions won since the code is compact and more inline what swing developers are already used to. LayoutManager: It's not to hard to add support for new LayoutManagers. Again, if you do write converters that you want to share. Let us know and we are going to add them to the builds. Wolf -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Patrick Forhan Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 7:22 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Forum] Things the new SwixMLshould have... Forgive me if these have been posted elsewhere... I've tried researching them myself with little progress. Here are some questions and comments: - Better documentation! I'm sure this is in progress, but a FAQ and a getting started would be very nice. The minimal introduction does not really cover enough. I'm looking for requirements and restrictions, lists of components for which it makes sense to have children, etc. It took me forever to remember how JTabbedPane works. On a kind-of-related note, can I set the available entries of a JComboBox? - Explanation of how to use named constants, colors, etc. How do I (for example) set a GridBagConstraints' anchor property to GridBagConstraints.EAST? How do I use colors? (Yes, some of the samples files show some color use, and I can check the Converter classes, but that doesn't mean it is obvious...) - XSplitPane should use the JSplitPane constructor that specifies two components -- even if these are null, it prevents completely the construction of the JButton objects, reducing object churn a bit. - I really dislike the two requirements for making a simple functional GUI: My class must extend SwingEngine and it must have public Action objects available. I would probably prefer passing a java.util.Map object into a SwingEngine constructor, or such. actionID->Action, perhaps? - The sample files have some pretty evil-sounding restrictions: /** * This file contains proprietary information of CarlsbadCubes * Copying or reproduction without prior written approval is prohibited. * Copyright (c) 2002-2003 */ Less restrictive samples would be helpful (and they probably should be included in the distribution). - Doing a GUI with GridBagLayout is still pretty messy, with all the constraint code in every component... is there any way we can make this look nicer, or would I be better off to use a more modern LayoutManager? Pat. P.S. The project looks promising, and I like the name! _______________________________________________ Forum mailing list [email protected] http://mars.lunarpages.com/mailman/listinfo/forum_carlsbadcubes.com
