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All of the Pentaho tools share integration points with the platform, additional third party tools, and each other. These integration points usually require similar (if not identical) dialogs in the user interface in order to interact with that particular feature. Many of these tools are not built upon a common technology because they have separate origins. A common definition for the dialogs, along with a framework that supports the necessary renderers for that user interface definition, relieves the developer from having to change the layout or functionality, and from having to build the dialog from scratch every time a new tool comes along that is based on a new technology, or a new integration point requires another common user interface.
Use Case 2: Customizable Menu Systems and Toolbars
It's a common request from the The Pentaho community, partners, and our clients to be able to frequently request the ability to customize the options available in our Pentaho client tools, as well as in the platform demo interfaces. Building the toolbars and menu systems in our Pentaho's products using an XML definition allows us developers to easily add or remove functional options. The XML definition describes the available options with a reference to how they should behave.
Use Case 3: New Tooling Applications
New applications are coming that will be required to plug-in as features to existing tools and plug-in to new architectures that are being designedThere are new applications in development which require the ability to plug into existing tools and future architectures. These "tooling applications" can generally be thought of and used as standalone applications, but don't make a lot of sense outside of the larger Pentaho client tools , or the platform itself. An example tooling application would be the The new Chart Editor is an example of such an application.
Overview
The XUL Framework starts by processing an XML user interface definition, as XUL is, inherently, an XML technology. The XUL specification lends itself well to providing definition for a standard widget toolset, the kind most developers would be comfortable with if they have used SWT or Swing. The spec does not allow for or account for more advanced components or completely customized components. For a detailed breakdown of what components fall into which category, refer to the Categorized UI Component Matrix.
Pentaho has extended the XUL specification with its own namespace in order to accommodate advanced functionality and customized UI components. How to use this namespace, and what elements/attributes are available can be found in the Pentaho XUL Specification Extension document.
The XUL Framework Architecture
XUL Framework Getting Started Guide
Implementations
The following implementations are in progress:
Projects Using the Pentaho XUL Framework
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The rest of this document explains this custom implementation in detail.