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by Danno Ferrin.
Original Post: GUI Design Tools are Not Just for the Weak
Feed Title: And They Shall Know Me By My Speling Errors
Feed URL: http://shemnon.com/speling/archives/cat_GUI.rdf
Feed Description: Danno Ferrin's Many Reasons he was a Comp Sci Major and not an English Major
Now on issue #2 that I see with monsuier BileBlog's rant on IDEs. The most relevent poriton of that previous quote is as follows.
Serious swing developers I suspect are likely to scoff [at IDEA's GUI designer tool] and stick to using their own hand rolled magic. Still, I'm sure java needs yet more ignorant mediocre inexperienced developers dabbling in swing eh? [The BileBlog
]
I suspect that he's never done serious Swing development, I also suspect that a serious OSS developer would use an an OSS version control system as well (and by suspect I mean "I'm speaking out of my ass here"). There is no doubting that hand-rolled magic is sometimes the only difference between a sophomore CS project and a shrink-wrapped product. But if I were going to write a GUI in nothing but hand-rolled magic I would need at least two to three times the schedule to accomplish it.
Why? Well, as I blogged nearly eight months ago productivity matters. There are times that you want to spend a lot of time tweaking the little tidbits, and there are lots of times you could honestly care less. That's why I like start out in the GUI designer rather than blank java class. Yea, I could do all the GridBagLayouts by hand. I could also make the vertical FlowLayouts line up nicely inside multiple BoxLayouts by hand, and I could even write my own layout manager to deal with my personal nits if I wished (in fact that was one of the first things I did with Java GUIs more than seven years ago). But why should I visualize the insets, gridwidths, and weightxs in my mind when I can visualize them with my eyes? GUI designers also speed up the tweak/compile/run loop we all get in just to see if you got a titled border on the right component or to see if you fill propertu on a component needs to be GridBagConstraints.HORIZONTAL or GridBagConstraints.BOTH or whether that box layout looks silly with an alignmentX of .96.
GUI designers are not just about layout stuff either (something the reviews indicate the IDEA designer focuses on exclusively). It's about basic wire-work as well. Do I really want to write the boilerplate code to attach some method to a actionPerformed listener added to a JButton or would I rather jump right into the code preping the data for the SOAP call? (the latter, because it's gonna have to be written anyway). When code is truly boilerplate (like button presses and menu selections) and can be automated it should be, wether it's as a language feature, an API convienece, or as a feature of the development tool.
Believe me, there are many times where hand-rolled magic is the way to go. But that time is not when you are saying "JTree here, JButton there."
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