Re: Swing pluggable application framework to use Swixml

For those of you who don't know Kevin Duffey (not sure why your email 
addy didn't show), he is running the project that Kate and I have 
mentioned.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/genpluginengine

-warner

On Tuesday, December 23, 2003, at 10:55 AM, [email protected] 
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> This would be my first post to this group. I'll give a
> brief background of what we are working on and more
> detail of how we would like to try to use Swixml if
> possible, with a few questions that hopefully some on
> the list can answer.
>
> I have been developing a generic plugin engine similar
> to the eclipse engine, only smaller in scope and
> features, although still a very capable and powerful
> engine. In a nutshell, it allows any application, gui
> or not, to add a very small 50K (presently) jar that
> gives the application immediate pluggable
> capabilities. The engine supports dynamic
> load/unload/reload of plugins at runtime, automatic
> dependency resolution at load time of each plugin,
> works on the premise of extension points and
> extensions like Eclipse only not as robust (no xml
> schema support, but dynamic xml is supported), adds an
> event/listener automatic configuration, and each
> plugin can be an exploded directory or in its own
> plugin archive file complete with embeddable libraries
> that do not have to be unzipped to be used. You can
> add specific plugin class types to be allowed loaded,
> specify different file extensions for plugin archive
> files, multiple URL locations to find plugins at and
> (eventually) auto-watch locations for updates. The
> engine is highly configurable, has an embeded xml pull
> parser and presently the size is 54K (with debug
> info).
>
> Now to the usage with Swixml. I am also very
> interested in providing a highly reusable Swing UI
> framework built around my plugin engine, so that any
> developer using it can quickly add plugins that extend
> existing extension points and get immediate reuse of
> several components as well as the UI framework which
> will provide menuitem/toolbar button integration,
> hopefully a "perspective" paradigm where by a button
> can be configured to "switch" views/editors on screen,
> and if all goes well, a tabbable drag/drop window
> hierarchy where by every window is derived from our
> internal window types so they can easily be
> dragged/dropped onto one another to form a tabbable
> layout like Eclipse IDE does. This also allows the app
> to use MDI or SDI at will.
>
> Presently I have a "core" UI plugin that provides
> menuitem/toolbar button integration so that any plugin
> can provide a bit of dynamic xml that specifies the
> menu name, the path, the Action class in the plugin to
> handle clicks, etc. This works great, but it means I
> have a lot of work to render the UI still.
>
> What I was hoping is somehow to use Swixml in a manner
> to render the UI. What I need the ability to do is
> provide my "proxy" event listener that is added to ALL
> menu items and toolbar buttons so that when first
> clicked my special proxy code is able to figure out
> the plugin that provided the menuitem or toolbar
> button, grab its action listener class, create it
> (thus creating the plugin at that time) and then
> forward the event on to the plugin's action listener
> class. More so, it then "replaces" the proxy listener
> at that time with the now created plugin listener
> class. From then on all clicks go directly to the
> plugin handling it.
>
> My thought is wrapping the swixml.jar and each plugin
> would then provide a second .xml file for Swixml.
> Somehow my swixml plugin wrapper has to take the
> provided swixml xml for each plugin, pass that to
> swixml to render the UI but "intercept" the handler
> class passed to swixml and ALWAYS pass it's own proxy
> actionlistener.
>
> Is this sort of thing possible, and if so, can you
> provide some example code perhaps on how in code I
> would set the action listene class of a menu item or
> toolbar button?
>
>
> Lastly, my UI framework is to provide a number of
> components, such as a new file chooser dialog, wizard
> component, help system (JavaHelp), preference dialog
> and other widgets (outlook style task bar, status bar,
> etc). Is there a way that swixml allows integration of
> components to be used such that defining them within
> swixml xml files is possible?
>
> Thanks.
>
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