The Site With the Lamp

October 1, 2005

Have been using Netbeans for quite some time with out using it's GUI designer. My opinion is that Netbeans is better than many of the other IDEs I have had the opportunity to use. But there is certainly room for improvement. The GUI designer is one of them.

I was quite shocked to learn that the code generated by the Form Designer (as netbeans calls it) cannot be edited by hand. Obviously you can open the source in your text editor and make changes, but you cannot edit it from with in the IDE itself. That sounds like something you might find in an IDE by that Redmond corporation. The behaviour is most Unbecoming of an open source IDE.

The design that I chose to create was a Tabbed Pane. Suprise , suprise, you cannot change the names for the tabs!

I decided to let sleeping dogs lie for the moment at least and continued with the design. The next problem occured when I attempted to use GridBagLayout as the layout. When even new components are added Netbeans add them to the first, it will not add them under the cursor (or the nearest matching slot).

The properties panel, which can be used to change the location for the added component is 'jumpy'. Meaning to say it's focus changes and it scrolls to a different location whenever you change the grid x or grid y of an added component. Now I have a sore wrist from so much right clicking and scrolling.

The third gripe is related to the original gripe of not being able to edit generated code. Sometimes, it's convinient to manually change the insets or colors by asigning them to a variable. That way they can all be changed quite easily. Unfortunately with netbeans, it seems like you have to manually click on each component and change it's properties individually.

Verdict: Use Netbeans for everything but GUI design. For GUI design use JBuilder Personal edition.