Progress?

Not really.

I'm still stuck with the problem caused when executing user-generated Schemas. I think I've narrowed the problem down to the State class, but I can't get any further! I've spent the last 3 days focusing on this and to say I'm frustrated is an understatement!

I'm going to leave this for now and work on setting the position of the block via the GUI. Once that's done I'll try to formalise what I know about the schema problem and see if Frank and Daniel have any ideas.

Generating XML - An easier way?

As a personal project, I once hacked together a small program to convert my old plain text IM logs to the Adium XML format. This was only a converter, it didn't deal with parsing the XML, just outputting it to a file. After some searching I found the xmlenc library on SourceForge. It seems to be much lighter and easier to use than SAX or DOM, while being far more stable than anything I have time to write myself.

A friend has recommended that I try XStream. I've never heard of this before, but it looks good after a quick scan of the website. The main advantage here seems to be that it will read the file back in again, creating objects automatically.

I'm leaning toward the familiar at the moment. That might change after some more reading though.