The first post I made with ScribeFire, had "Powere by ScribeFire"
appended at the end. I wanted to turn that down, so I started to browse
the site. In one Comment for the release note i found this tip:
To
disable the "Powered by ScribeFire" message, click on the <<
simbol at the top left of the ScribeFire panel, go to "Settings" and
uncheck the "Automatically insert Powered by ScribeFire" setting.
Happy blogging.
XmlGridLayout is a LayoutManager that seeks to provide all the power of
GridBagLayout with the simplicity of an HTML table. Also, it tries to be
a way to separate the layout declaration from the component declaration.
(reposted from a long-forgotten blog)
There used to be a movement to promote the creation of complex GUI using XML. This seems like a good idea, if you can find a nice way to express what you want.
IMO, the flaw in the implementations I have found so far is that all of them seems to mix up both definition of the component (properties, etc), the behavior of the component (Listener registration) and the Layout. Everything is thrown in the same bag and shaked. It's just a way to express things with XML instead of Java, so there is no true advantage to that approach unless you want to cut down the compilation process (see [1]).
So, why would I want to represent a GUI as XML?... I can see two reasons:
* Ease the GUI manipulation by tools
* Tackle the complexity of GUI building with Awt/Swing
The first one is pretty much straightforward: It's easier to maintain a script that has a well known (albeit rigid) semantic than to maintain a class that the programmer will try to modify to bend it to it's will.
The second point raises an interesting question: Is really that complex to create a GUI? If so, why?
Most Java programmers I know tremble at the mention of two dreaded words: SWING and AWT. Those few braves who don't tremble, but are willing and sometimes eager to dive in the complexity of building, GUI start to shake at the mention of one "simple" class: GridBagLayout. This layout is famed for it's flexibility and complexity... Add this to the fact that struggling with the layout managers, preferred sizes, layout hints and so on to make the components be displayed the way we want can be one of the most titanical and time-consuming task in the GUI development and you can see that making a good GUI in Swing can be daunting to some people.
But what if laying out the GUI were a task as simple as building an HTML table? Perhaps this first barrier would be lifted and the programmer can concentrate in what he knows best: To program logic.
Currently I'm playing with MoveableType, to learn how to use the templating system to create a beautiful website. Thus, this particular blog is set to "dynamically publish all templates" so I don't need to republish everything each time I do a change.
After I manage to learn how to do things, I'll put it back to "statically publish all templates". I like having the generated html around (being burned one to many times with dynamic content generation in other blog/wiki/content management systems).
