Swing has Swung -- a substitute for my buttons?

[Dave Elwood]

I've been using Netbeans for about three years in developing a GUI project.

Now, as of version 7.0 they will no longer support my buttons and JFrames and such.

Is there a product of GUI buttons, checkboxes and such which is an upgrade of swing, or must I rework the whole >blank, blank< GUI interface again?

[Michael Dunn]

the joys of giving control to a 'gui-builder'

[Martin Vashko]

I've also used NetBeans GUI builder in a project, but quickly begun to dislike it. I've removed all the "form" files from project (so it was no longer recognized as a GUI builder form) and gradually rewritten each form when it needed an update. Worth the effort if you ask me.

[Dave Elwood]

Hello Martin,

If you need a form then you need a form. There was a time 12 or so years ago when they had something called "Widgets", a package to use in C++ programs.
Is there anything like this on the market? If your app needs a form and only Swing offers it then why did netbeans drop the Swing stuff?

[Matthew Brown]

I'm a little confused here, because as far as I can tell Netbeans 7 still supports Swing: http://netbeans.org/features/java/swing.html

What am I missing?

[Dave Elwood]

About 7 I should say.

[Martin Vashko]

It seems I didn't express myself very clearly. I was trying to suggest to stop using the GUI builder. In this case it is necessary to remove the *.form files from the project, otherwise you'll clash with Netbeans if you try to modify the generated code. You can leave the actual source code untouched as long as you don't need to modify them, and rewrite them only when you need to modify the layout significantly, so maybe you'd be able to spread the overhead over a time long enough not to break your existing schedule.

I don't understand exactly the problem you face with the GUI builder, and I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to help anyway, my affair with the builder was fairly short. Sorry to disappoint.

[Dave Elwood]

The thing is this :

if I upgrade Netbeans beyond where I have it now 7.0.1 or some such, then I won't be able to modify my GUI.

And I want to modify my GUI every week or so.

If I upgrade Netbeans then what can I do if I want to write a GUI app with a big fat blue button in the middle of the window???
Have the people at Netbeans gone blind?

[Rob Spoor]

I think you will find that a lot of people in the Swing forum are supporters of writing their GUIs by hand, without using a GUI builder.

[Dave Elwood]

I'm sorry Rob, but what do you mean by

"writing their GUIs by hand, without using a GUI builder"

Writing by hand....? Do you mean that horrible "you on the right, you on the left, and the rest of you hug the lower margin" stuff?

On the market are there other options, such as seperate, independent GUI builders?

[Rob Spoor]

I meant using layout managers the way they are supposed to be used - BorderLayout, FlowLayout, GridLayout, etc.

[Dave Elwood]

In other words I must do it the more difficult way. Seems like a philosophical step backwards.

Are there any "GUI Layout Managing for Dummies" - products out there?

[Martin Vashko]

This could be a good starting point.

[Dave Elwood]

Thanks for the tip Martin.

So, as the chinese cook said, I'll take a wok at it.

[Darryl Burke]

Dave Elwood wrote:In other words I must do it the more difficult way.

I'd say that for anything more than a demo mock-up, hand-coding is the *easier* way.

[Ranganathan Kaliyur Mannar]

NetBeans hasn't stopped shipping the GUI editor...so, I don't understand what the problem is...

Dave Elwood wrote:Have the people at Netbeans gone blind?

Why don't you post the problem in the NetBeans forum?

[Yohan Weerasinghe]

Ranganathan Kaliyur Mannar wrote:NetBeans hasn't stopped shipping the GUI editor...so, I don't understand what the problem is...

Dave Elwood wrote:Have the people at Netbeans gone blind?

Why don't you post the problem in the NetBeans forum?

Sometimes Netbeans doesn't support GUI built using old versions. I think that is his issue. One of my teacher was used to use netbeans for GUI build, and she is still with netbeans 5.0 because her GUI will go mad if she upgraded it.

I agree with others about writing GUI by hand. I asked about this question from my lecturer too, he said automated building doesn't follow some good programming principles. To me, coding is more flexible than using automated creation.

[Yohan Weerasinghe]

Just use Netbeans as a RICH TEXT EDITOR

[Ranganathan Kaliyur Mannar]

Yohan Weerasinghe wrote:Sometimes Netbeans doesn't support GUI built using old versions. I think that is his issue.

oh ok...

[Archana Honnavalli]

I too used Netbeans to create my screens.
Later lost my .form file as we forgot to check in these files in repository.

Now we just need to used the form as is without any GUI change.

If we need GUI change then recreate the form and merge the code that has logic for every event.
Tough job

Need to check working with Layout Manager as Martin Vajsar said for further updates.