🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004 23:48:37 -0500, Paul Furbacher wrote:

> All too often, I hear or read people saying there's no decent GUI designer
> for Swing -- in fact, some moaner/whiner was prattling on in JDJ's most

Have you had a look at the new GUI layout designer that comes with the new
EAP releases of IntelliJ IDEA?

It's quite a drastic shift from anything that other IDE's have been doing.

a) It uses its own layout manager
b) Form layouts are stored in XML
c) Forms are bound to a class, the class can any class, not just a
JPanel/JFrame
d) Swing components creation code is byte-code injected at
compile time ( source generation is available thou )
e) components you actually care about can be bound to instance fields in
the bound class

The tool is designed ( at least seems to be ) a purely layout tool. 
Currently theres no way of attaching Actions or ActionListeners, which is
good (imho) in that it leaves things up to the developer to choose which
method they want ( Actions over ActionListeners, inners vs annonymous
inners etc. etc. ).

What you end up with is a class that only has fields you want to use
declared, and any logic code, keeping the layout code separate ( which has
also been a pet hate of Swing/AWT ).

It reminds me more of Delphi's way of handling .DFM files, only you don't
need to have hundreds of TLabel/JLabels declared in your classes.