title: UI Development with Java and XUL
body: <p>I'm interested in using XUL as a standard way of defining my Java app (both Swing and web alike) UIs. To do this, I need two major components:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>An open source GUI builder that allows me to drag n'drop UI elements, like Abeille forms or Matisse, etc., and export these UIs into a standards-compliant XUL file</li>
  <li>A Java lib for reading that exported XUL file and building UI components out of it</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I would have <em>thought</em> this would be easy to find, however there are a number of problems:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>For one, I can't seem to find an "official" XSD Schema for XUL (even off of Mozilla's site), so it doesn't seem to be universally enforced/validated from a central schema, and as such, seems to have lots of conflicting variations across various XUL tools/products
  <ul>
  <li>Hence, gettting one tool that can export a XUL file, and a Java lib to read that XUL file without errors, seems to be difficult/impossible</li>
  </ul></li>
  <li>All the XUL-based GUI builders I've found seem to be proprietary and expensive</li>
  <li>The only Java libs that can read XUL files seem to be billed as "XUL toolkits" and include a web server, templating engine, etc. In other words, they are overkill for what I need, which is something that can read a XUL file and produce a container object full of UI widgets.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Anyone have any idea as to how I could marry these two ideas together and accomplish what I need? Thanks in advance!</p>