• Post Reply Bookmark Topic Watch Topic
  • New Topic
programming forums Java Mobile Certification Databases Caching Books Engineering Micro Controllers OS Languages Paradigms IDEs Build Tools Frameworks Application Servers Open Source This Site Careers Other Pie Elite all forums
this forum made possible by our volunteer staff, including ...
Marshals:
  • Campbell Ritchie
  • Jeanne Boyarsky
  • Ron McLeod
  • Paul Clapham
  • Liutauras Vilda
Sheriffs:
  • paul wheaton
  • Rob Spoor
  • Devaka Cooray
Saloon Keepers:
  • Stephan van Hulst
  • Tim Holloway
  • Carey Brown
  • Frits Walraven
  • Tim Moores
Bartenders:
  • Mikalai Zaikin

use code generators or not

 
Ranch Hand
Posts: 243
Python
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
I've just finished a beta version of a program and I've spent a lot of company time manualy writing code for a swing GUI. The GUI still has some non nicities but it works. I'm considering changing to a GUI builder to build these things, but may try and do it manually for a bit longer.

WHat do you people think
 
author
Posts: 14112
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
I always handcode my GUIs, and find that with some care, there are a lot of opportunities to reuse code. Basically with the time, we build a small but powerful domain specific GUI framework that's exactly is fitted to our needs.

It's a little bit more work up front and needs some experience to do well, but I don't think that it can be beat buy a GUI builder for anything but the simplest project. Your mileage may vary...
 
Saloon Keeper
Posts: 27752
196
Android Eclipse IDE Tomcat Server Redhat Java Linux
  • Mark post as helpful
  • send pies
    Number of slices to send:
    Optional 'thank-you' note:
  • Quote
  • Report post to moderator
I'm not well-organized enough to manually track GUI components for hand assembly. OTOH, I've yet so see a GUI code builder for Java that didn't cheat and slip in some proprietary classes and often build some pretty dumb code at that.

The way I got around it was to use the Visual Cafe GUI builder (remember Visual Cafe? Circa Y2k?). It produced the GUI for me, but with the usual vendor slop in it. Then I ran the generated code through a Perl script I hacked out that converted the vender-specific code to generic Swing code and got rid of the logical that was totally brain-dead (It also converted absolute gridbaglayout code to relative code so it would be easier to hand-maintain).

I haven't done this lately. I think Visual Cafe can still be made to work, though. If not, the same tricks can be applied to many of the newer Swing code generators.
 
Self destruct mode activated. Instructions for deactivation encoded in this tiny ad.
a bit of art, as a gift, the permaculture playing cards
https://gardener-gift.com
reply
    Bookmark Topic Watch Topic
  • New Topic