The Roma Project

On past Friday I've changed the logo from "Roma Meta Framework" to "The Roma Project". The reason resides to avoid confusing people about Roma goals and mission. I'd like people speaks of "Roma" and not of "Roma Framework".

However the first release 1.0 alpha is very close to been published. The main change with 0.9.9 is the dynamic desktop management. You can define the desktop composition in a desktop.xml file. This feature allow to create very complex application without write any Echo2 code.

Roma Framework big refactoring

Hi,
yesterday night a great idea light my mind... A new way to define desktop in View Aspect. It was too much simple to catch before...

Below a default desktop (I replaced open/close characted with []):

[desktop]
[area name="main" render="column"\]
[area name="top" /]
[area name="body" render="grid"/]
[area name="bottom" /]
[/area]
[/desktop]


By using XML to define the desktop assure cross View Aspect portability. The idea is very simple: to define, by area tags, a way to create containers ala Swing. Each area has a name that can be used as layout foreach POJO fields and actions. Furthermore area tag allow optionally the render to use. Available renders are:

- Null (Empty container)
- Row
- Column
- Grid
- Tab (TabbedPane)

I'm working for a XmlDesktop working with Echo2 implementation. Thanks to this feature users will be able to build complex and nice pages without effort!

Echo2 XML stylesheet will make the rest changing colors, images, fonts, spacing, etc.

Cool!