CookSwt: XML to SWT GUI

CookSwt is a library which builds Java SWT GUI from XML documents. The current version is 1.2.

Features

• All SWT components can be configured. Resources (Image, Font, Color, Cursor) are automatically disposed when widgets using them are disposed. Run the demo on your local machine with "-ea" (enable assertion) for disposal messages.
• All SWT Layouts. Any complex layouts can be created.
• All SWT Listeners.
• Simple custom dialog creations with <xmldialog>.
• Small things, such as DROP_DOWN ToolItem with DROP_DOWN Menu, adding control to a CoolItem or ToolItem and set the size at the same time, auto-relayout Shell when a CoolBar resizes, and auto-relayout wrapped ToolBar.

The following features are common to CookXml extensions.

• Simple custom tags extensions.
• Include other XML documents, or an element within an XML document.
• Locale and ResourceBundle support.
• Various containers (Vector, LinkedList, Map, Set, and such), Strings, primitives, Object/primitive arrays, etc can all be configured.

There is one feature missing (comparing to CookSwing), the ability to synchronized menu item and button states. Unfortunately, I just don't see how that is possible for Enabled/Disabled states without telling programmer to re-write their listeners base on a new class. In fact that was what JFace was doing with IAction. Before fully evaluating the possibility of dealing JFace with XML, it is probably not a good idea in introducing a whole new set of things.

Demo

Try the Java Web Start demo (Windows only) for a glimpse of the features offered. The demo itself used the CookSwt to generate the GUI. Since SWT requires native library, full permission is necessary.

What's New

• 1.3
  
  1. Updated CookSwt for CookXml 3.0. CookSwt is in the namespace "http://cookxml.sf.net/cookswt/".
• 1.2.1
  
  1. Forgot to make glcanvas to inherit canvas tag in 1.2.
• 1.2
  
  1. Updated CookSwt for SWT 3.2. The changes are:
     • 1ToolTip
     • ExpandBar and ExpandItem
     • GLCanvas and GLData. GLCanvas is limited to creating a new empty instance. <gldata> needs to be a child of <glcanvas>.
     • Table and Tree added "sortingdirection" setter.
     • Composite added "backgroundmode" setter;
     Let me know if I missed anything.
  2. updated examples and added some missing widget examples.
• 1.1.1
  
  1. Fixed ImageConverter bug for 3.1 where ICON_ is the prefix for system images. Thanks to Thorsten Dittmar.
• 1.1
  
  1. Updated for CookXml 2.0.
  2. Updated for SWT 3.1. Specifically, <tabletree> and <tabletreeitem> are removed from the tag library. <link>, <spinner>, and <treecolumn> are added.
  3. Additional widget demos in CookSwtDemo.
• 1.0
  The initial release.