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Tiffany Screens - Presentation Broadcasting

I never really liked going to "PowerPoint Meetings", sharing the screen content with others during a meeting usually required to connect a projector to the presenter's Laptop. In a lengthy process, the Laptop's screen resolution and refresh-rate needed to be manually adjusted to synchronize with the projector. The adjustment procedure was often followed by a single lecture style presentation, featuring slides being projected hugely magnified onto one of the meeting room's walls.

Tiffany Screens allows you to share presentations (or any screen content) with your peer group, without requiring a projector.
Imagine a scenario, where every participant brought a Laptop to a meeting and watched the presentation on that Laptop's display - participants would probably sit on a table facing each other, instead of the wall. No adjustments are necessary; images are scaled automatically on arrival, to best match the receiver's display-capability. To support lively meetings, everyone participating can with a single button click, turn his computer into the presenting device.

Presentation broadcasting • Tiffany Screens 2.6

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Theodore - Visual XUL Editor for Thinlet

In fall 2002 I had played around with Thinlets, which I liked for its lean approach. However, because it lacked tools and extensibility, I didn't want to use it for serious projects. Today, the Thinlet library might still lack an object-oriented implementation but at least there is a tool now .. meet Theodore.

After I had written Theodore 1.0, I was even more convinced that GUI resources belong into XML descriptors, to be evaluated at runtime, instead of using code generators before compile time.
In January 2003 I founded the Swixml open source project (www.swixml.org) to combine the benefits of Swing (availability of models, extensibility of widgets etc.) with the lean XUL-approach, demonstrated by the Thinlet developers.

thinlet • Theodore 3.0 - IDE for Thinlet Developers

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SwiX^ml - XUL Engine for Swing

Swixml, is a small GUI generating engine for Java applications and applets. Graphical User Interfaces are described in XML documents that are parsed and rendered into javax.swing objects at runtime.

java.net • The Source for Java^TM Technology Collaboration

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Woodrow - Parsing and Un-marshalling

Woodrow instantiates Java classes based on XML encoded descriptors, a process known as un-marshalling or de-serialization of XML data into newly created Java content trees. Every tag in the descriptor has the potential to trigger the instantiation of a registered Java class. After such an instantiation, the tag's attributes are tried to be mapped to a property of the newly created object.

Since attributes are read as Java Strings, Converters are needed to translate attribute values into types fitting the setter methods, which will eventually be called to set the object's properties. For example, if the java.util.Vector.class had been be registered with the name "list" and also a converter exists, able to convert a String into an int, then the tag: <list size="5"/> would result in the instantiation of a Vector class and its size would be set to 5.

Woodrow differentiates itself from existing compile-time solutions like Apache-SOAP, AXIS, JiBX or JAXB (compiler generates the interfaces and the implementation classes corresponding to an XML Schema), by using reflection and introspection at runtime. Woodrow may take the capabilities of the un-marshalling device into account and doesn't require the creation of DTDs or XML-Schemas.

Copyright ©2008 Wolf Paulus, All Rights Reserved.
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