Second, there is a library called swixml (http://www.swixml.org/) which allows you to write the GUI part of the code in a declarative manner and have the library wire the two things together.
Both makes it much less of a pita to write GUIs in Java.
There is also Griffon (http://griffon.codehaus.org/) that is a MVC (Rails like) framework for Swing apps that uses Groovy. I haven't used it, but from what I have seen, it does make it easier to work with Swing.
I had not heard of swixml. Thanks for the pointer.
But it's good to see the effort on Java as well, which can do DSLs as well, even those these are easier on languages that actively support them, such as scala, groovy, ruby, clojure, ...
And wiring them up doesn't get any easier than using JRuby with Monkeybars (http://monkeybars.org). Yes, I'm biased, I'm the project leader. But still. :)
DSLs and such are nice for smallish UIs, but once you get to anything remotely sophisticated tweaking text files to sort out alignment, flow, balance, etc. is crazy. (And double crazy if those text files are XML.)
Is the use of generics in Java still not common?
