Hi, I think SWIXML is an interesting software, because it looks like a very straightforward, thin layer over the Swing components.
I'm trying to evaluate its applicability in a servlet/applet environment. I think of a solution where the SWIXML code is generated by the servlet and sent to the applet in a similar way with SwingML. The problem with SwingML is that it is less thin and is harder to extend than SWIXML, and its evolution looks less dynamic. In such an application it would be helpful if the SWIXML document could be reloaded, and also if there would be more support for more dynamically and interactively building/extending the GUI. For this it would be necessary to make the SWIXML api a bit more flexible, which provides finer grained access to the component tree. It looks like the current merge feature involves duplication of parts of the SWIXML documents. It would be helpful if a container could be extended with a SWIXML document fraction. For instance a button click could trigger the reloading of the content of a panel from a external source which provides the necessary SWIXML markup. At the moment there is a single point of access to internal object tree, the SwingEngine. Unfortunately this operates only at the top level. I would imagine such an interface which could provide access to an possibly arbitrary node of the internal object tree, and would allow also the modification of the element. So actually we've got an interface for the overall manipulation of the tree but not one for the manipulation of its nodes. At this stage I think that the main reason of having to subclass the SwingEngine is the definition the actions as its fields which can be referred to from the SWIXML document. The addition of an action map/lookup mechanism would remove this constraint. We could set the action map for the engine and still access the actions in the same way. It would be nice if SWIXML wouldn't depend on JDOM. A really lightweight library would better stand only on the core API of J2SE. The the org.w3c.dom.* classes from the JDK wouldn't do it? I might be able to contribute later. That's all for now. Keep up the good work! Regards, Levente
