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by James Gosling.
Original Post: At last: intelligent UI layout
Feed Title: James Gosling: on the Java road...
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Feed Description: I've been inescapably tagged as "the Java guy", despite the fact that I havn't worked in the Java product organization for a couple of years (I do still kibbitz). These days I work at Sun's research lab about two thirds of the time, and do customer visits and talks the other third. For more detail...
One of the cool things being shown off today at NetBeans day is Matisse,
an open-source plugin that does intelligent layout of user interfaces. As
you drag and drop components, it automatically derives constraints (which
you can tune) between the components in the new UI. This gives a developer
experience that has the ease of use of a simple absolute/matrix
positioning UI layout system (which is what almost all UI editors do) and
yet produces layouts that have the ability to respond to dynamic behavior
like resizing windows or internationalization (ever try to put German
labels on buttons sized for Japanese?)
This works particularly well with the advanced components from JDNC,
like the intelligent table that allows you to easily connect data
sources to table cells. With the drag and drop layout and wiring, this
gives you an incredible ability to build desktop apps very quickly.
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