Vincent Brabant's Blog

October 2006 Archives

Reaction about the Charles Ditzel Interview

Sun Developer Network published an interessting interview of Charles Ditzel. But I wanted to react on some part.

We also occasionally hear that the layout manager, GroupLayout, which the NetBeans IDE GUI Builder uses to create its great user interfaces (UIs), causes some sort of lock-in or is proprietary. It's in JDK 6 and included as a library for use in JDK 5.0 and 1.4. As you can see, it's neither a lock-in nor proprietary.

He is right by saying that you have no lock-in nor proprietary. But at run-time only. Because at development time, you are locked with NetBeans, and his famous .form file.

When that will be fixed. When the GUI editor of NetBeans will be able to edit any java source file WITHOUT needs of a proprietary .form file, then, only then, you could say that there is no lock-in.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.