Hello, Allow me to quote Tim Boudreau (who is Sun's Netbeans Tech Lead as far as I know, please correct me if I'm mistaken) ranting about XUL on the comp.java.netbeans.user-interface mailinglist: The core problem here is that there is no java equivalent to Windows resource files. This is a well-solved problem. The *static* portion of a GUI can easily be created at runtime from a declarative file by some kind of form engine. Decorations, dynamic stuff etc. can be done dynamically, and you *can* do your whole UI dynamically if you want to.
Two way editing is the wrong target, and trying to do it by parsing source code is always going to be problematic (hence the guarded block solution)...and prone to performance problems. The only way to be sure what the code you're parsing does is to instantiate it (some years ago Simplicity for Java did some interesting things with a JVM within a JVM to acheive that, but AFAIK it didn't exactly scale). And it may not actually be instantiable, if it's a GUI piece of some larger thing, and all the classes it touches are not available. This problem can be solved very simply with a declarative file format. The down side is that then your users have to ship your form parsing engine with their app. If there's some standard out there (please *don't* say XUL!), that could work. I firmly believe that making GUIs easy to build and edit is a higher priority target than doing it purely by generating source code. Full story @ http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.netbeans.user-interface/7872 Any comments? - Gerald ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn _______________________________________________ xul-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xul-talk
