GUI Design (DWT) with XML

[Bill Baxter]

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