XML in GUI Construction

Graphical user interfaces consist of graphical components laid out in a container. The creation, positioning, and connecting of these graphical components can be specified with a declarative syntax. XML is well suited to this task. This separation of an application into pluggable parts is an application-level example of Model-View-Controller. The view (graphical user object) can be separate from the application (functional operations).

In this section, we examine both a small and large implementation of this idea. The small implementation is a markup language to describe a GUI's menu. The large example is Bluestone's XwingML, which allows the creation of an entire Swing-based graphical user interface from an XML document. ...

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