Custom layout managers...

Is there a way currently to use a custom layout manager?

I may be missing it, but it looks like the only way to do this is to add code to the layoutconverter class.  

Just as a quick hack I allowed the layout tag to include the name of a class to be created when it's not recognized by one of the special tags.  So your new Swixml tag might look like this

<panel layout="com.toth.MyLayout" >

and it would do a forName and newInstance on that class name.  Problem with this approach is that you can't provide parameters to the constructor, but maybe that can be worked in a future version.  


Here's the patch, that I generated with TextPad's compare should be similar to diff.
Patch generated by textpad
Compare: (<)C:\proj\swixml\src.bak\org\swixml\converters\LayoutConverter.java (9866 bytes)
   with: (>)C:\proj\swixml\src\org\swixml\converters\LayoutConverter.java (10177 bytes)

251a251,260
>       } else {
>        try {
>          Class classname = Class.forName( attr.getValue() );
>          lm = (LayoutManager) classname.newInstance();
>        } catch ( Exception e ) {//tried, and failed 
>        if( SwingEngine.DEBUG_MODE ) {
>         e.printStackTrace(System.err); 
>        }
>        
>        }