Exporting a GUI to xml?

Question

Is there a tool to take a GUI designed in C# or other languages that can take the screen layout and export that to an XML file such that you end up with a template of the screen in xml terms? As well as take an xml file and display the resulting screen?

Answer 1

There is java.beans.XMLEncoder/XMLDecoder. But if you want to do that sort of thing, I think you are misguided.

Answer 2

Have you investigated XAML in WPF? You mention C#, so it seems like this is directly in line with what you're asking about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAML

Another good jumping off point might be this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_user_interface_markup_languages

Answer 3

XAML and XUL are designed to work in precisely this way. QT and Glade also offer this facility. However, they do not (as far as I know) offer any facility to reverse engineer a GUI that was not created with the layout tooling.

To use this type of tool you have to go from the form designer, which will save the form as a descriptor file. The toolkit will then offer various means (the exact method varies with the toolkit) to load the descriptor file and render the screen from it or use the descriptor as input into a code generator.