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Swixml is used in GlassFish's openInstaller Framework

By Wolf Paulus <wolf@wolfpaulus.com>

Posted Friday, August 24th, 2007

GlassFish is the open source community based implementation of Java EE 5. GlassFish has a few tools projects, one of which is openInstaller.

openInstaller is an open source community project building a free and comprehensive next generation installer framework. While the initial development of openInstaller was done by Sun Microsystems, it is now available under the open source Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

The openInstaller project provides the framework for developers to create cross platform installations; it is a part of the GlassFish community of projects, and now includes and uses the Swixml, which I had created a couple years back. Swixml is a GUI generating engine that uses Declarative Programming to define Graphical User Interfaces.

James Falkner blogs a series of screenshots of openInstaller in action and while openInstaller leverages the advantages of SwiXML, the openInstaller's UI model seems to make the xml descriptors much more complicated than what the original Swixml descriptor look like.
Jayanth Krupanidhi shows the complex xml descriptor for this rather simple dialog. However, he also states that efforts for developing NetBeans plugins that help in the creation of these UI-definition XMLs using a simple drag-and-drop mechanism are already underway.

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Published on: Friday, August 24th, 2007 • Category: [java]
Article URL : http://wolfpaulus.com/journal/java/swixfish.html