How does UIKit compare to Suns Archiver package and IBMs Bean Markup Language?
Sun’s Archiver and IBM’s Bean Markup Language (BML) are both technologies which allow sets of objects to be reconstructed from XML files. In this sense, they are quite similar to UIKit. Both of them were designed to address much larger and more general sets of problems than UIKit, however. Archiver is intended to be a general purpose object serialization mechanism. BML is designed to be a complete programming environment, in which you create entire programs (or large sections of programs) by connecting beans together, using embedded JavaScript to add intelligence and manage the communication between the beans. In contrast, UIKit is intended to do one specific thing very, very well: creating user interfaces for Java programs. As a result, it is faster, simpler, and easier to use than either of the other packages. For example, suppose that you want to create a Label which says “Hello!” in bright red, 18 point, bold, serif text. Here is the necessary XML for Sun’s Archiver.
