The Site With the Lamp

October 23, 2005

The attempt the other day to design a GUI with Netbeans 5 didn't meet with much success. I assumed the reason for this was because I was working on a design that was initiated with the older 4.1 version. Today I made a fresh attempt starting from scratch and met with a certain amount of success.

Netbeans happily allowed me to drag and drop components as I pleased and their placements was at the most natural location (4.1 insisted on placing them at the most un-natural location). It still wouldn't allow you to rename the tabs in a tabbed pane but nobody is perfect. However after some time netbeans started to act up again. The same exception that was seen yesterday showed it's face when a component was resized. The best way to design GUIs is by hand with a GridBagLayout!

Went on to other things but I found that whatever source file that I opened the indentation was wrong. No amount of juggling with the indentation settings would put that right. Worse still netbeans now insists on placing the brackets at the wrong positions. If that setting can be changed it's cleverly hidden.

Time to uninstall the 5.0 Beta and go back to the 4.1 version that seems to work well.