Vincent Brabant's Blog

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.

Comments

• I'm sorry, but I do not agree with your statement of being locked-in. GroupLayout does not require Netbeans to be used at development time nor is it dependent on .form files to operate. I can use Eclipse (or any editor) and use GroupLayout just fine; it's not necessarily the easiest layout to use by hand, but it's not impossible either to work from scratch or by tweaking something that's already laid out. When working on handing coding and using GroupLayout at development time, a .form file never enters into the equation.

  If you do use Matisse, then decide to edit the code in a different environment that the Netbeans editor would normally block from edits, then you probably couldn't edit in Matisse again, but you could delete the .form file and just open it as a regular .java file and edit the code. It's inconvenient at this point, but it's hardly lock-in.

  Posted by: stevenyi on October 14, 2006 at 05:04 AM

• I think it's not difficult to code GroupLayout by hand after you know what ParallelGroup and SequentialGroup are.

  Posted by: weijun on October 14, 2006 at 05:50 AM

• Besides, nothing prevents other GUI builder to add support for GroupLayout.

  Posted by: gfx on October 14, 2006 at 06:00 AM

• Which is btw already happening:

  http://downloads.instantiations.com/DesignerDoc/integration/latest/docs/html/preferences/preferences_swing_grouplayout.html

  Posted by: romanstrobl on October 14, 2006 at 09:06 AM

• If you are ready to pay a small fee, you have another choice : MyEclipse. Not that I tried it myself, but now MyEclipse do include NetBeans Matisse GUI builder... So no lock-in at all and no need to program with GroupLayout by hand.

  Posted by: hferland on October 14, 2006 at 07:17 PM

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