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RE: Generating User Interfaces from Schema

Subject: RE: Generating User Interfaces from Schema
From: "Angel Gavin" <agavin@xxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 17:29:03 +0200
generating gui from xml
Thanks Michael,

I think I catch your point.

In the company I'm working for we have an internal tool to generate
interfaces in TCL/Tk from a GUI description in a non-XML text file. Someone
proposed to describe the GUI using an XML "vocabulary". We did something
like that and it works (although with some constrains). We just defined the
vocabulary and create an XSLT transformation to generate the ASCII files
required by our tool. No magic solution (far from it). The effort was
already  done in the development of the TCL/Tk generation tool.

XML was supposed to simplify GUI description, but unfortunately it is very
similar to its non-XML counterpart. Needless to say that the use of
graphical tools (in our case, XML Spy) to generate schemas would simplify
the process, avoiding the "manual" definition of the GUI in the XML
vocabulary.

The generation of GUI layout does not seem to be the real problem. For
instance, if your schema describes a uniform set of elements (say Book) each
one consisting of simpleType elements (say Title, Subject, Author,
NumPages), you could create a table with one row per Book, and input boxes
in each cell for the Title, Subject, etc. A detailed discussion on this may
be out of the scope of this list, but I reckon that for some "simple"
structured data it should not be very complicated to generate the graphical
layout of the interface. For me, the real challenge is to manage input data
and produce the output files (which do not necessarily have to be XML
files). But generating a dummy (non-functional) GUI should be quite easy
starting from the XML Schema document.

Actually, if we are about to simplify things, we could even start from an
XML instance document, which might be the simplest approach.

Maybe I am being very optimistic (I hope not! I committed to do this some
months ago!), so any feedback will be highly appreciated.

Again, thanks a lot for your response.

Regards,
Angel

PS: I will take the opportunity to thank you for your excellent books on
XSLT/XPath. Congratulations! They are brilliant and very instructive!


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Kay [mailto:mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 19 July 2005 16:34
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE:  Generating User Interfaces from Schema
>
>
> As mentioned in another thread, there is a lot of processing to get from a
> schema document (a chunk of XML) to a schema (a set of components with
> properties). You probably want to start from the schema, not from
> the schema
> document.
>
> There seems to be a need for a tool here that generates an XML
> representation of the schema, perhaps as a schema document in some kind of
> "normal form" with appinfo annotations to represent the computed
> properties.
> Having written a schema processor in Java, I find it hard to
> imagine writing
> one in XSLT, though I'm sure it can be done in theory.
>
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Angel Gavin [mailto:agavin@xxxxxx]
> > Sent: 19 July 2005 10:09
> > To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Subject:  Generating User Interfaces from Schema
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I have read a lot about the suitability of XSLT to generate
> > Graphical User
> > Interfaces (GUI) from XML Schema. I suppose that many people has been
> > working on this before, but I just want to get some feedback
> > from the list.
> > Are there any related project/initiatives/products/... to
> > generate GUIs in
> > an automated way? I only know one commercial product
> > (JAXFront) and, as far
> > as I know, it is not based on XSLT.
> >
> > At the time being I can foresee some restrictions (not
> > necessarily linked to
> > the use of XSLT, but to automation itself) I may need to
> > impose to Schemas.
> > Any hints on this will be much appreciated too.
> >
> > Thanks a lot in advance for your help,
> > Angel
> >
> >
> > ______________________
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> > su borrado.
> > Gracias por su colaboracion.
> > ______________________
> > This message including any attachments may contain confidential
> > information, according to our Information Security Management System,
> >  and intended solely for a specific individual to whom they
> > are addressed.
> >  Any unauthorised copy, disclosure or distribution of this message
> >  is strictly forbidden. If you have received this
> > transmission in error,
> >  please notify the sender immediately and delete it.
> > ______________________
>


______________________
Este mensaje, y en su caso, cualquier fichero anexo al mismo,
 puede contener informacion clasificada por su emisor como confidencial
 en el marco de su Sistema de Gestion de Seguridad de la 
Informacion siendo para uso exclusivo del destinatario, quedando 
prohibida su divulgacion copia o distribucion a terceros sin la 
autorizacion expresa del remitente. Si Vd. ha recibido este mensaje 
 erroneamente, se ruega lo notifique al remitente y proceda a su borrado. 
Gracias por su colaboracion.
______________________
This message including any attachments may contain confidential 
information, according to our Information Security Management System,
 and intended solely for a specific individual to whom they are addressed.
 Any unauthorised copy, disclosure or distribution of this message
 is strictly forbidden. If you have received this transmission in error,
 please notify the sender immediately and delete it.
______________________

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