Hello,
I'm not saying that XML is a bad idea. On the contrary. A proper RSC editor that reads and writes XML version of the RSC will be a great development tool: - Super-objects can be created. Complex objects that consist of several simpler objects. E.g. listboxes, datepicker... - Store references to code with the objects. This makes it relatively easy to integrate the RSC editor with an IDE (you refer to the XML objects in the code, not the actual AES object), thus resulting in a real 'Visual GEM' programming environment. - Easy to support multiple languages.
For information, this is what some developers had in mind ;)One of the piece of this work is DFRM. It's open source. The aim is to create dynamically a GEM form based on a "human ?" description of objects, for example "place a text "blabla" centred on this object", and the size of the whole form is recomputed to cope with the size of the new added object. It's really cool for translation where length of text may change once translated.
Next (missing) step is an xml parser to read xml file and built a RSC form with an extra properties to identify each object managed by the application (for example text id "BUTTON_OK" attached to the OK button, the text id being defined in the XML file, and then, application may use ObjcFindById(tree,"BUTTON_ID") or something like that to get the index of the OK button in the tree).
I hope you'll find some useful ideas or piece of code there. http://windom.sf.net http://windom.free.fr/dfrm/ Arnaud.