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CookSwing is an open source Java library that converts an XML document into Java Swing GUI at runtime. It is a tag library for CookXml, a general purpose XML parser. It was developed to be fast, extensible, and simple to use.
Reasons to Describe GUI using XML
In General
* Simple internationalization. CookSwing offers a mechanism to load strings from resource bundles.
* Simple localization. Some languages require different GUI layouts due to font and orientation. In these cases, with CookSwing one could use different XML layouts for a component depending on the target platform. It is a significantly more challenging task for other approaches that do not involve the use of UI scripts.
* CookSwing provides a centralized place to configure the look-n-feel of components. For instance, one could change the meaning of from a regular JToolBar to a custom toolbar which supports 3D look and possibly docking. In contrast, it is harder to do so for Java based approaches since such need must be envisioned beforehand and use factory based approaches in creating components to avoid the massive changes across GUI components, although the use of AspectJ can alleviate such problem.
* Being in XML allows tools such XSLT to transform from one look-n-feel to another. For example, one initially uses |
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