From: albartell
I have been doing some Java GUI development this week and am using the
Matisse tooling in MyEclipseIDE ($50/yr for the Pro version). It seems to
be a step up from what WDSC 7.0 has for a visual editor. There are some
things I don't like about it, but in general I like it more than WDSC
7.0's.
This discussion seems to be veering a little bit away from WDSC; I think
discussing alternate toolkits for web development might be better served in
WEB400-L. But unless and until David says that's the case, I'll add my
remarks here.
Most importantly, be careful which framework you use. Code generation
tools, particularly GUI tools, generate code based on the best practices of
the person who wrote the tool, and those practices may or may not be
applicable to your shop.
My biggest problem with Matisse is that it's not really an Eclipse project;
it's a Sun project, part of NetBeans. I worry about the tension between Sun
and IBM regarding tooling. I'm not saying this will ever happen, but if
Matisse needs to choose between a design that work with NetBeans and one
that works with Eclipse, I'm pretty comfortable with which way Sun will go.
Also, Matisse relies on an open source layout manager called GroupLayout
which isn't really that well documented or even that well known outside the
NetBeans community. However, Sun included GroupLayout into a recent build
of Java 6.0, so this particular issue is perhaps less important.
Finally, there are some problems with GroupLayout just as there are with any
other layout manager. As a simple example, GroupLayout's independent
vertical and horizontal layers mean that it's hard to line things up when
other fields interfere, something we do all the time in business
applications:
Customer: xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Address1: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Address2: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Salesman: xxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In this form, we want the salesman description to line up with the customer
description, and with GroupLayout, it's not easy to do cleanly, because the
edge lineup capabilities won't skip a line.
Does this mean GroupLayout or Matisse are bad? Certainly not. But there
are a number of other layout managers out there and if you're going to go
outside of the box of standard IBM tooling, it's a good idea to check all of
the options.
Joe
midrange.com
