For the past 5 or so years, we've been using a docked XUI control set within
Arbortext to facilitate content-aware authoring tools. This has worked out
pretty well, and at the time we didn't want to spend too much time creating
a GUI, so XUI did the trick.
Recently, however, we've been making some changes to our back-end content
management, which has led me to put all CMS-specific code up on a service
layer, with simple RESTful calls being made from Arbortext. Because of
this, I'm now using Netbeans, and have thought of making some changes to the
GUI.
So... I guess my question is: Has anyone had success/experience docking a
Java Swing control within a XUI panel? Back when XUI was pretty new, I had
tried using some ActiveX embedding, but performance (and writing ActiveX in
general) were less than optimal.
Even our current XUI controls are written directly in Java, using
Document.createElement() type methods (plenty of examples up on adepters.org),
so programmatically, it shouldn't be much of a change.
Pros/Cons:
XUI Pros: Auto-resizing, native Arbortext internal handling, Already
implemented
XUI Cons: Limited UI controls, limited control functionality, increased
screen real-estate (eg: no right-click), must restart Arbortext each time to
test
Swing Pros: New UI feature options, less screen real-estate, consistent
look&feel with our other toolsets, easier testing
Swing Cons: No code yet implemented, unknown Arbortext integration
Attached is a screenshot of one of our current tools to manage citations
within a document. You can see where the number of buttons gets unwieldy
without alternatives such as right-click.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts,
Keith Berard
