Coding for GUI is such a drag :(

[Bobby Sharma]

I am sick of writing Gui because it is time-consuming.I wonder if there
any IDE(like Visual Studio) available so that I need not write code for Gui.

best regards,
omi
[ November 02, 2008: Message edited by: omi sharma ]

[Rob Spoor]

Try Netbeans, or the GEF under Eclipse.

[Tuna Töre]

Yes there is a good plugin free for non-commercial use...
Jigloo plugin for eclipse, you shoul try it

http://www.cloudgarden.com/jigloo/

All you need is to put all plugin jars and features jars to orginal eclipse folder(eclipse home)

[Ravikanth kolli]

Ya i too agree coding for GUI is always difficult.. netbeans is one of the best for GUIs.

[Sumit Bisht]

Is'nt coding in eclipse done under a different api (swt)?
Are there any major differences regarding swt and awt/swing?
please give your views.

[Bobby Sharma]

thanks for all informations

Lets say together Writing GUI sucks

best regards,
omi

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by omi sharma:
Lets say together Writing GUI sucks

Vendor lock in is worse. Imagine what happens when your favorite GUI editor is no longer available or maintained. Then you are stuck trying to debug and fix horribly written generated code. GUI editors are great for proof of concepts but you are much better off writing the production code yourself, IMHO.

In talking to some .NET engineers I know, drag and drop GUI creation in Visual Studio isn't used as much as you might think, for the same reasons as stated above, minus the vendor lock issue since it is MS after all.

[Bobby Sharma]

Vendor lock ?? never heard about it.Destruction of my favorite GUI builder
will be nightmare for me.

you scared me to death. jk

O.k. bro, I will mark you word.

best regards,
omi

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by omi sharma:
Vendor lock ?? never heard about it.

Vendor Lock-in

[Tim Holloway]

I experienced vendor lock-in when Visual Caf� died. They had a fairly good GUI designer, but it did a lot of its work using proprietary helper classes.

Actually I didn't get locked in, but that's because I wrote a Perl script that translated the Visual Caf� class calls to generic Swing statements.

One of the things I liked when IntelliJ 6 arrived was that it could generate vendor-free GUI code.

[Bobby Sharma]

Coding for GUI is such as drag but Vendor lock-in is such a pain.

I thought Vendor lock-in problem is only faced by C/C++ programmers.

How come Java? Java is free ,isn't it?

Need to learn lot of things from you guys

best regards,
omi

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by omi sharma:
Coding for GUI is such as drag but Vendor lock-in is such a pain.

I thought Vendor lock-in problem is only faced by C/C++ programmers.

How come Java? Java is free ,isn't it?

Need to learn lot of things from you guys

best regards,
omi

Just because it is free doesn't prevent vendor lock-in. But that isn't even the point I was trying to make. The concept of GUI designer vendor lock has nothing to do with it being in Java. It has to do with whatever proprietary means that tool is generating your UI code and how easy of difficult that code is to maintain outside of that tool.

Example: Netbeans GUI Builder (formerly Project Matisse) is probably one of the best, if not the best, tool for creating UI's via drag and drop and WYSIWYG type of editing. The problem, the layout manager they use to construct the UI is very tool friendly and very developer unfriendly.

To me, that is vendor lock-in because if one day a) netbeans was gone (not likely) or b) I had to stop using it, or c) something else, having to manually debug, edit, fix, create new UI code is not something I would look forward to doing given the existing code Netbeans created for me.

[Rohan Dhruva]

IMO, NetBeans generates nicely commented and readable code which is NetBeans agnostic. I don't think vendor lock-in should be an issue with NetBeans.

The productivity gained by using drag-and-drop GUI generators is far more advantageous, which is why we have programs like Qt designer, Glade, Visual Studio etc.

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by Rohan Dhruva:
IMO, NetBeans generates nicely commented and readable code which is NetBeans agnostic. I don't think vendor lock-in should be an issue with NetBeans.

The productivity gained by using drag-and-drop GUI generators is far more advantageous, which is why we have programs like Qt designer, Glade, Visual Studio etc.

It may be beautiful but why doesn't Netbeans let you edit the UI generation code inside of Netbeans? Because if it isn't just perfect then Netbeans can't render the UI in the IDE anymore. I've tried to use GUI builders on several occasions and other than prototyping I've personally found them more hindering than useful.

I'm losing a battle with a fellow engineer working on a project because his claim that is if we don't use a UI designer tool he can't modify forms. But he also won't take an hour to learn MigLayout. I can write set methods faster than I can edit those little property panels in UI designer tools.

This is of course my opinion.

[Ted Smyth]

Originally posted by Gregg Bolinger:

I'm losing a battle with a fellow engineer working on a project because his claim that is if we don't use a UI designer tool he can't modify forms. But he also won't take an hour to learn MigLayout. I can write set methods faster than I can edit those little property panels in UI designer tools.

This is of course my opinion.

I support that opinion and the proliferation of MigLayout! MigLayout in Java 7 IMO.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Originally posted by Gregg Bolinger:
I can write set methods faster than I can edit those little property panels in UI designer tools.

Tha reminds me of writing properties in .NET with VisualStudio. We were told off for not using the "add property" function of VS, but I could write or edit them much faster by hand.