Design This Container

I attended the Creating Professional Swing UIs Using NetBeans GUI Builder (Formerly Code-Named “Matisse”). I been meaning to get started with the NetBeans GUI Builder to become a more productive UI developer. An important point for me is that Matisse supports custom components. This is important for me because at my company we have developed a lot of custom components. The Matisse GUI Builder is a WYSIWYG visual builder with a drag and drop feel which can be used to design an UI as oppose to developing one. Of course UI builders are great to quickly prototype an application.

The NetBeans UI Builder reminds me a of XCode’s Interface Builder. An IDE has context help, and UI Builder, like Interface Builder, have alignment help. With both these tools, UI design becomes an art rather than a science. At the end of the session one of the speakers simple summed up the session as, “Hand coding bad, Matisse good.”

Here is a good design practice when using the NetBeans UI Builder: Design every container as resizable.

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