Re: [xPG] Ideas behind gui

[Frank L. <fra...@we...>]

Hi,

Some short words of mine to the gui ideas.

1. Usability: 
The ui should be as simple as possible to use. 
Thats why we have only a few tabbed panes with the basic functions
(similar to gpg/gpa).

2. Architecture:
Our/My approach was to have two layers:
- an ui-layer
- an engine(layer) that encapsulates the cryptographic functions and the
configuration.
the glue between the 2 layers should be (swing)-models (table, tree)
that adapts the xpg-engine-classes to the ui.

at this time this idea isn't consequently used in all parts of the (my)
code. 
Some things should be done in another (cleaner) way.
the idea behind the layered approach was to support alternate ui-s (if
somebody will write it :) )
(awt, j2me - uses midlets or some things like that?).

the ui-stuff is structured as followed:

xpg.tool.ui - the base ui-package
xpg.tools.ui.swing - for the main classes of the swing-ui
xpg.tools.ui.swing.engine - the stuff for the engine (not quit right
here, imho should be changed in the future to xpg.tools.ui.engine)
and a sub-package for each of the tabpanes (preferences, keys, crypt/
decrypt ...)

if you want to add an alternate ui use by example xpg.tools.ui.j2me .

finally a few words to the directory-structure of the project.
in the project-dir there is an ant-script for:
 - building and running the ui (imho targets "compile" and "ui.swing")
 - creating the javadoc
 - preliminary support for java-webstart
 - test runs with junit-classes (target "test" - mostly used by ingos
xpg-classes)
 - build of the distribution (does some additiona stuff)

in the lib-subdir there should be all used jar-files for building and
executing.
docs is for additional documentation.

Regards, Gulliver