UI Design with Java and XML Toolkits - JAXX and Thinlet
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JAXX (it doesn't actually stand for anything but you can guess at a glance that Java and XML are involved) is probably the best toolkit in terms of documentation; there is an excellent, well produced, well maintained and most importantly, recently updated web site at http://www.jaxxframework.org/ which gives you everything you need to know to begin creating UIs with JAXX. There is a thorough installation guide and some excellent tutorials to get you started and a live forum for if you get stuck and need some assistance.
One of the things that makes JAXX so useful is its powerful CSS support which enables the skinning of applications via simple style sheets. It is very easy to get started with JAXX; I was able to run through the tutorials and get results on screen very quickly. My experiment GUIs didn't actually do anything as there was no underlying Java to make things work, but it was good just to get something to actually launch. It's easy to look through the example applications provided to see what is going on and how to use the different tags effectively. Out of all of the toolkits I looked at, this was without doubt the easiest to begin using.
Thinlet is another well know Java and XML UI toolkit that differentiates from some of the previous examples by avoiding swing altogether and using the abstract window toolkit (AWT) instead. AWT is an older set of UI designing widgets that swing was developed to replace. One of the key differences between AWT and swing is the nature of how each toolkit renders the various GUI elements, with swing providing more consistency across any platform as opposed to AWT relying more on the underlying OS implementation.
What Thinlet does is provide an extremely small toolkit that excels at creating relatively simple interfaces, when the complexity of some swing components can be avoided. The documentation for Thinlet is quite good, providing a local copy of what can be found on the Thinlet website (www.thinlet.com), including details of the widgets themselves and the API. There are some examples included in the documentation (including an excellent Amazon browser) that you can fire up and look at to get an idea of how things work.
Thinlet is free and open source for anyone from enthusiasts to commercial enterprises and was released under the GNU Lesser Public License. There are some extensive Thinlet tutorials out there, but the documentation included requires a working knowledge of Java and presumes familiarity with class compilation, CLASSPATH variables and more so this is probably not best suited to newcomers to Java application programming. People that already have a working knowledge of Java may be attracted to Thinlet's simplicity.
These are just some of the available resources out there for building XML based GUIs for your Java applications, providing an easily maintainable application with a completely separate presentation layer. You can save valuable development time this way, and there are a variety of toolkits you can use depending on what suits you and your experience level.
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