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Středa leden 25, 2006

Matisse is Good for Prototyping

I just crossed a post from Colm Smyth who writes that he was able to design a Spellchecker dialog in 3 minutes 18 seconds. He says it's the first time he used Matisse with a specific design in mind.

Hmm, interesting usage of Matisse... instead of drawing the UI on paper you can just play around a prototype the form. If it's not good enough, just scratch it, you can have another form visually prepared in few minutes. If you want to prototype HTML & JSF, you can try to use Creator's WYSIWYG editor. Now if there was a tool to make prototyping of code behind these UIs easy... or is that too much to ask for?

Comments:

Hi Roumen,

I think Matisse is *absolutely* right for rapid UI prototyping; it's automatic layouting and guidelines make it the smartest and fastest way to build UI's I've found anywhere. I'll use it even when the GUI toolkit has nothing to do with Swing - for SWT, Windows, XUL, or even HTML.

I'd really like to see the Matisse GUI become part of Creator's GUI editor, especially if it could create a common or comparable XML description.

All the best,
Colm.

Posted by Colm Smyth on leden 25, 2006 at 11:29 odp. CET #

Not really on-topic, but I’ll ask anyway :/ How is it possible to make a gui component like that with the gui editor and then have it popup in the main gui program. That is I have a JFrame that I have built with the gui editor. It has a menu with menu items. What I want is an options window that pops up when I press the appropriate menu item. I have tried to find examples of how to do this, but the only thing I have found so far is an example from SUNs pages where they use a JDialog / JOptionPane that they write from scratch and call from the JFrame. Is it not possible to make a custom maintainable JDialog / JOptionPane /JSomeThingAppropriate with the netbeans gui editor? There are lots of ‘sub’ windows in netbeans and other gui programs, they are not all written without the aid of a gui editor? I’m really hoping this should be painfully obvious to me. Any information or examples of building a 'real' application would be greatly appreciated.

Posted by lumbago on leden 26, 2006 at 11:07 dop. CET #

Right-Click --> New --> File/Folder --> Java GUI Forms --> JDialog / JPanel / ...

Posted by Alex Lam on leden 26, 2006 at 12:34 odp. CET #

Exactly, just create a new JDialog and then call it from the original JFrame:

private void openWindow(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) {
NewJDialog nj = new NewJDialog(this, true);
nj.setVisible(true);
}

Posted by Roumen on leden 26, 2006 at 01:28 odp. CET #

I would NEVER have looked there, thanks a lot. Free virtual hugs for everyone \o/

Posted by lumbago on leden 26, 2006 at 04:18 odp. CET #

Yeah, this is where NetBeans 5.0 excels! I can't help myself but use it for prototyping swing dialogs. I hope you all can do the same magic makeover to the editor for the next release.

Posted by jtr on leden 26, 2006 at 04:20 odp. CET #

We will certainly try to do some magic to the editor. If you have any free mana, send it to us... we'll need it!

Posted by Roumen on leden 26, 2006 at 06:56 odp. CET #

We were just working on a prototype of CRUD application generator - a wizard for NetBeans - Jano Rojcek drawing the UI on the white board and me describing what it should do. Petr Pisl mentioned you suggest Mattise for prototyping and I started implemented the UI right away. I quickly cought up with Jano and I was basically done with the UI when he designed it! I am not kidding man, it was implemented, including I18N. I will commit it when I implement the generator :-) Thanks for the tip, it really worx.

Posted by 192.18.42.11 on leden 27, 2006 at 10:16 dop. CET #

Nice!

Posted by Roumen on leden 27, 2006 at 01:18 odp. CET #