Interesting stuff - that's very similar to what I had in mind for use
with SWT, though I'd intended to have the code actually create any
active components (SwiXML apparently creates them from the XML and then
uses reflection to save references in fields for access by the code).
Have you tried this out?
- Dennis
Warner Onstine wrote:
Umm, have you guys seen SwiXML?
http://swixml.org/
-warner
On Aug 8, 2004, at 12:29 AM, Dennis Sosnoski wrote:
That's interesting to see, they're taking an approach similar to
something I've been planning. People have been trying for several
years now to come up with XML GUI designs for Java, along the lines
of Mozilla's XUL. I think that kind of approach is overkill for Java,
though, and that rather than trying to put the whole GUI description
(including actions and such) into an XML configuration, you'd be much
better off to just put the layout information there. The layouts are
about 90% of the pain in doing cross-platform GUIs anyway, at least
in my experience. It looks like Intellij is going further than I'd
take it, but that's typical of these visual layout tools. At least
it's cleaner than generating the GridBag garbage in code with // {<@
AUTOGENERATED CODE - DO NOT MODIFY tags around it.
My idea is to just do the layouts in an XML configuration, and do it
that way as a convenience to programmers who basically want to
control things themselves rather than using a D&D-type tool (so you
still create your active controls, only the passive containers and
layouts go into the XML; that way you can easily tweak the layouts
without recompiling, or even support multiple layouts depending on
how something is being used). Maybe I'll have an example for SWT by
September.
- Dennis
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