Tuesday October 13, 2009
Tuesday October 13, 2009
Reusing the Matisse GUI Builder
Rather than creating a visual editor from scratch, as I have been doing for my JavaBeans, it is also possible to reuse the Matisse GUI Builder. Of course, that results in a set of limitations, such as the fact that the output can only be Java (together with the form XML file that Matisse requires). However, if you accept those limitations, then going this route is possible.
You can create a module that removes all the existing palette items and then add your own:
In fact, Tim Boudreau recently took this approach at a customer consultancy and has produced this tutorial which describes how to bundle a JavaBean (together with a custom editor) for use by the Matisse GUI Builder:
Integrated Property Editors in NetBeans
And, that's currently the newest NetBeans Platform tutorial!
Oct 13 2009, 08:58:05 AM PDT Permalink
3 Comments
Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/geertjan/entry/reusing_the_matisse_gui_builder1
Comments:
Cool. Now the only thing I need is a way that I can override the default generation of Java code, so that it will generate my language or store everything in a database.
Posted by Kovica on October 13, 2009 at 11:29 PM PDT #
Perhaps Eclipse folks can benefit from this, since they still don't have UI builder.
Posted by Postmortem on October 14, 2009 at 07:08 AM PDT #
Well, maybe matisse itself shold be modified (separated into parts) to not generate java by itself, and another module generate the java code, so if someone need a editor, matisse will be certainly be the right (and easy) choice!
Posted by Flavio on October 14, 2009 at 09:48 PM PDT #
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