On Mon, 26 Nov 2001 09:34, Uli Mayring wrote: > My idea is that a user interface can be described in XML. Then we have an > XML schema that goes over the user interface we just wrote and tells us if > it's a legal user interface or not. Hand-crafting a GUI is a pretty buggy > and obnoxious process, writing some XML and checking against a schema is > much better in my mind.
Hell yes !!!! You may want to have a look at the XUL project at mozilla. They essentially describe the GUI for all mozilla based applications using an XML format. Unfortunately this is in C/C++ ;( However there is a jXUL project in progress that I am eagerly awaiting to deliver. XUL (XML UI Language IIRC) describes things at the level of screen components and has things like <button>, <form/> and so forth. Another project that I loved and cloned ages ago was IBMs BML (Bean Markup Language). It worked with raw beans which you could also use to assemble GUIs. It was somewhat more raw and still required programming skills but it was still better than writing code. Another option would be to have a look at the XML description language used by QT (a cross-platform C/C++ UI toolkit). Its relatively nice and their GUI builder (just creates an XML file) is great. Itis the same thing used in the K desktop on the *nixes. > There are probably many more points. I saw this particular light, when I > started to use Cocoon1. I wrote several "quick'n'dirty" applications that > were needed in a hurry. So instead of writing a frontend I used the web > browser and at the server side Cocoon1 to do the logic. I wrote several > XSP taglibs to help model the applications. Each application screen is an > XML/XSP file residing on the web server and its logic is encoded in > XSP taglib calls. User input goes via standard HTML forms. kool. > The only negative aspect of those browser-based Cocoon1 apps is program > flow. The only way you can send a user somewhere else is by using a > redirect. You can dynamically calculate the target location for the > redirect, but when your apps become larger you quickly lose yourself in a > web of dynamically-built redirects. The "if this, go there, else do that > except if that is so" type of statements must be centralized in one place, > so you can manage the workflow of large applications sensibly. You don't > want to distribute these statements over hundreds of XML/XSP files. This can be generalized in an XML workflow language. Theres a few attempts in opensource and commercial alike that attempt this. Many are even independent of the rendering technology (ie XML vs Swing vs whatever). -- Cheers, Pete *------------------------------------------------* | Trying is the first step to failure. | | So never try, Lisa - Homer Jay Simpson | *------------------------------------------------* -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
