I'm perFLEXed

Yesterday Adobe released it's Flex 3 and naturally I went there to see this new cool technology. I downloaded it and got an Eclipse with a GUI-Builder to create SWF-Applications. The nice thing is that Flex uses an XML-Format to store the GUI, ... .

I guess you know what's coming now, don't you? I sat down and looked closer to find out that it would be fairly easy to write a Transformer to convert this in my custom EXSWT-Format used to build SWT/JFace-GUIs. After about 2 hours I now have a minimal XSLT-Stylesheet transforming MXML-Elements (currently mx:label, mx:combo, mx:button) to EXSWT and feeding it into my EXSWT-Lib. The only problem are different heights and widths needed by SWT and SWF but those are minor problems.

Here's the original Flex-Project View one can export as an SWF-Application:

And here the one displayed using SWT-Widgets:

This is only a simple example but it shows how easy it is to define highlevel dialects on top of EXSWT which is a more or less lowlevel XML-Language.

You can as always get the sources from my SVN-Repository and I have once more prepared a .psf-File for all Subclipse users.