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I’d like to announce the release of Novocode Application Framework 0.4.

NAF provides a layer of MVC-based GUI components on top of SWT and JFace. A GUI is specified as a tree of NAF components which can then be instantiated as SWT controls. More than just a one to one wrapper of SWT component properties, NAF includes resource management (e.g. shared images and fonts), simplified configuration (e.g. CSS-like size units for layout managers) and model binding. Component trees can be described in a simple XML notation or in JavaScript with an extended JSON format. Applications can also be written entirely in JavaScript. The resource management framework can be used to instantiate and  configure your own classes with a few simple annotations, and it is easily extended for other description or scripting languages.

It’s been a while since the last release which is in part due to design problems with the previous versions, which took me quite some time to resolve. The project still doesn’t have a catchier name but it is now a lot easier to write custom components and the resource management framework can be extended for formats other than XML. The major new feature from an application programmer’s point of view is the JavaScript support.

NAF is licensed under EPL 1.0 and can be downloaded from http://novocode.com/naf/.