Way back in fall 2002, I had discovered Thinlets, which I liked for its lean approach. However, because it lacked tools and extensibility, I couldn't really use it for more serious projects. Still, the concept was intriguing, and while reimplementing it in a more object-oriented and extensible fashing wasn't an option, the least I could do, was to write an editor .. meet Theodore.

After I had written Theodore 1.0, I was even more convinced that Graphical User Interfaces should be described in XML documents that are parsed and rendered into widgets at runtime, a concept which should become known as the declarative UI paradigm. So in January 2003 I founded the Swixml open source project (www.swixml.org) to combine the benefits of Swing (availability of models, extensibility of widgets etc.) with the lean XUL-approach, demonstrated by the Thinlet project.

While my focus was clearly on Swixml, I still kept the Thinled Editor up to date, and eventually released the significantly updated Theodore 3.0 - IDE for Thinlet Developers, which was built with (and shiped with) the classic Thinlet.jar.

Today, Theodore is set free, turns freeware, i.e. there is no freeware editon anymore. The full-featured Theodore 3.0 AP Edition is available for download at http://wolfpaulus.com/theodore/ (the webstart version as been updated as well).