XML Description Documents

The original purpose of UIBuilder is to utilize XML/XSL technology to ease the development and maintenance of Java Swing/SWT UI applications. To achieve it, we introduce XML description documents to define, specify, and inicate the attributes, listeners, and data models for Java UI components, as follow:

• Specify each component's type, font, color, border, icon, dimension, enable/disable, constrains, ActionCommand, scroll-bar policy, etc. Whatever attributes associated with the component's view.
• Specify the Layout for those containers (Frame, Applet, Panel, Dialog, and so on): defining the LayoutManager , specifying the contained components , and indicating the position or constrains for each component.
• Specify the HelpID string for those components, which require the on-line help information. A HelpID will connect a component to a specified help topic , according to the JavaHelp APIs.
• Indicate the components' Action or Listener , including the listener type and its implementation class .
• Indicate the Models , CellRenderers , and CellEditors for those components which are designed based-on the MVC architecture , such as JTree , JList , JComboBox , JTable , etc.

XSL Templates

UIBuilder utilizes a set of XSL templates to genarte resources bundle properties files from the XML Description Documents automatically. Those XSL templates will extract the key-value pairs from XML description documents for differnt languages and differnt locations. So, for a new language or location, you can add those value s to XML docuemnts, or copy a generated properties file and then change it. Check the samples section for examples.

Multi-thread Framework

Provides a thread-safe mutlti-thread framework for Java Swing applications. In a complicated UI application, using threads to do those time-cosuming work is very general. However Java Swing is not thread safe. In UIBuilder we provide a thread-safe muli-thread framework to solve the problem.