BeJUG Rich User Interface Seminar - March 22/2005, Brussels

Hello,

  Stephan Janssen writes:

  The XUL frameworks play an important role to make
the developer's and graphical designer's life a lot
easier. XUL, which stands for XML User interface
Language, was brought to everybody's attention in the
late nineties when it was introduced with the Mozilla
browser. Since then a lot of Java implementations of
XML-based User interface Languages appeared, of which
JellySwing, Thinlet, XUI and SwingML are the best
known. To make life even easiers, some of the above
frameworks even allow you to define the style in a
seperate file, just as CSS does for HTML. There is
only one bad thing about these frameworks, they are
not interoperable, there is no universal accepted
standard for XUL as there is for HTML of XHTML for
example. You can not reuse the xml you wrote for one
of the frameworks with another framework, they all
define their own XML User interface Language.

The most heard complaint about client side
applications in Java is that they are so ugly. This is
one of the biggest misconceptions about Swing! The
only problem is that it takes a lot of effort to make
a good look and feel for Java applications. To make
life easier, on javatoo.com you can find look and
feels that you can easily incorporate in your own
applications. Applications build with the look and
feel of JGoodies or Skin Look And Feel look a lot
better that when you use the standard look and feel!

Another approach is to build rich internet
applications by taking advantage of the fact that a
lot of people have the Flash plugin installed in their
browser and that SWF can be dynamically generated on
the server side by tools like OpenLaszlo or by using
Flex. Both make use of XML based User interface
Language, but here the XML is generated or written on
the server side and compiled and send to the client to
be executed by the Flash plugin in the browser.

Last but not least, there are new efforts like JDIC,
which can be used to access native compontents (access
to the browser, the tray, etc...) from within Java
applications,and JDNC, which provides richer
components, a higher level API and a XML User
interface Language. These can greatly simplify
development of Java desktop clients.

In this workshop, we will try to show the latest
innovations in the above areas.

  More @
http://www.bejug.org/confluenceBeJUG/display/BeJUG/Rich+User+Interface+Seminar

  What's your take? Do you think Stephan Janssen
missed out on some XUL frameworks in the posting?

  - Gerald


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