Swingactions

Hi,

I just started to have a look at the swing action framework.
Have you checked it all in or is it not yet finished? If it is not
yet finished maybe we should move it into the sandbox hierarchy
to reflect that.

Anyways the way I was originally thinking about doing it is different
from how you have started. I will describe what I was thinking and
see what you think. I was thinking that the design of the package
would essentially have 4 parts

* metadata: the metadata that represents each action
* reader: the package that reads from XML file and builds metadata
* runtime: the package that creates and manages the action instances
* ui: the package that creates the UI elements for actions

If you want to have a look at what I meant you can probably look in
the spice-xmlpolicy and spice-classman components which follow a
similar pattern. They different slightly in naming of packages and also
because they have a "verifier" package that is probably not necessary
for swingactions.

The advantags of this design is that it is very easy to replace each of the
different stages except metadata with a different implementation. ie I could
have a reader that generated metadata from properties files or from a
database. I could also replace the runtime or UI to be web-based or use
AWT or SWT without too much hassle. It is also MUCH easier to unit test.

The disadvantage is the slight increase in complexity when setting up the
system
but to avoid that we could easily add in a Configurator like utility class.

Anyways - what do you think ?



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