Why Eclipse is not as good as NetBeans for building desktop Java UI-s
Eclipse is a decent Java development environment… until it comes to you actually having to build desktop GUI apps. As of today, it seems to suck bigtime in this department.
So the mission is simple. I want to build a fairly straightforward GUI app, which has a bunch of frames and dialogs. Nothing fancy. I just want to have a simple visual editor for the GUI components, you know, like Visual Basic’s dialog editor or Xcode’s Interface Builder or NetBeans Design view. So that I can lay out text fields and buttons and things on the canvas and later manipulate them in code.
You’d expect that something basic like this would be as a core part of a Java development environment, right? Wrong. Eclipse doesn’t have something like this bundled. And getting the extra component to work is a major pain and I couldn’t do it.
Sure enough, they have this Visual Editor Project. Ooh, sounds fancy. But I installed it and it hanged as described in this thread. And then I went back to the page and read what it says.
Please note: 2007-10-03: Current official builds of the Visual Editor require Eclipse 3.2 (Callisto). The Visual Editor is migrating progressively to Eclipse 3.3 (Europa). Preliminary instructions on testing preview builds are available on the VE wiki.
So let me get this right. You have the Europa Eclipse build which is the latest official version. And you have the Visual Editor latest official version. But they don’t work together? And according to the wiki, I have to pull some weird components from some thirdparty site for it to work, or manipulate tons of XML configuration manually, or downgrade to the previous version of Eclipse?
I’m sorry, people. It fails short of my expectations for a production system. I shouldn’t have to go through this sort of crazy hoops and loops just to build one little silly GUI frame.
So until Eclipse gets their act together in the UI building department, they simply force me to stick with NetBeans for this purpose. Sure enough, NetBeans is in some ways less fancy than Eclipse. For example their context menus in the IDE have a non-native feel and suck a bit compared to Eclipse’s native feel on OS X. But hey, at least they have a non-retarded way of getting GUI editing to work, which is kind of important to me at this point, so I’m going ahead and going to use it for now.
4 Comments
Leave a comment
So, just because Eclipse doesn’t do what you want straight out of the box makes it “not good for building desktop Java UI-s”. Maybe you should take a look at what Adobe has done with Flex Builder.
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/flexbuilder/
And no, that doesn’t come straight out of the box! Thats why they have to charge a shit load of money for it.
Is that right? Or you could donate money to the Eclipse project to support them so they can hire that engineer that can implement that feature, or you could start contributing yourself by actually putting in time and implement this feature yourself instead of just winging about it.
pan69: I have no particular affiliation with the Eclipse project at this time. I just want to get my work done, whether with Eclipse or something else. And if Eclipse does not do what I need, but NetBeans does, then I just use NetBeans. Easy choice.
I have modified the title of the post to reflect that I am not judging Eclipse on an absolute scale, but just comparing it with a similar product for my needs.
Or you can use Jigloo, another free GUI builder. It is very good and can generate AWT/Swing code or SWT. (http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/Web_Links-index-req-viewlink-cid-53.html) I loved VE because it was simply to use and generated nice and clean code and it is a pity that VE is no more supported.
Why don’t you use commercial product like window builder pro? IMHO it’s superior to anything on netbeans.