GUI Design (DWT) with XML

[Jacob Carlborg]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 5:47 AM, TomD <t_demmer at nospam.web.de> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I have uploaded xwt to
>> http://demmer.kilu.de/Software/xwt_20090305.zip
>>
>> This is an extensible library that parses the XML description
>> of a GUI. It is based on DWT, the SWT port to D, and Tango. In theory,
>> it should run unaltered on Win32 and Linux, and one day also on OSX.
>>
>> The basic idea is to wrap all widgets into a class that implements a
>> configure method for each widget. During load of the XML tree, the
>> widget tree is built in parallel.
>>
>> I have included a couple of examples, so you get the idea.
>>
>> Feedback&bug reports welcome.
> 
> I was hoping you might get some comments on this.
> It seems to me a lot of people like the idea of XML files to configure
> a gui.  I'm not a big fan of XML, so hard for me to get excited on
> that score.  Also if I'm going to use a text-file gui description
> thing, I'm probably only going to use it because some GUI tool was
> able to spit it out for me automatically.  If I have to write the text
> file, I don't see how it's all that much of an improvement over just
> writing the GUI code to begin with.  Of course once you have the
> load/save of GUI layouts worked out, it's just a "simple" matter of
> making a GUI to create the layouts after that.
> 
> Other question I have is -- doesn't SWT already have something for
> creating GUI layouts?
> 
> --bb

There are two eclipse plugins, VisualEditor from eclipse and 
WindowBuilder. Both are GUI builders and there is no xml involved. 
WindowBuilder is far superior but it's neither open source or free.