[Apokio]

Long time lurker but first time poster. I have taken a couple of programming courses in college and one JAVA course. I am starting to create some small applications to do various things. In school when I created a GUI I used the GridLayout with an array to set all the buttons, and North,South,East,West,Center (can't remember what it is called) to create a GUI for a simple inventory program. Later I used NetBeans to make the GUI look a lot better but when I looked at the code that NetBeans created it was very confusing. I was just wondering what techniques do you guys and gals with experience in JAVA use to create a nice looking layout for a JAVA GUI. I know all the elements can be manually set by the x,y cordinates but is this really the best way? NetBeans feels like cheating to me because I am just learning and I feel like it does the work for me, but do most programmers use a IDE to create the GUI's? Thanks in advance.

[xclite]

Most automatic generators can be quite confusing. I always code them myself, but that also takes much longer than a generator.

[macosxnerd101]

Apokio, on 14 Aug, 2009 - 01:02 PM, said:

Long time lurker but first time poster. I have taken a couple of programming courses in college and one JAVA course. I am starting to create some small applications to do various things. In school when I created a GUI I used the GridLayout with an array to set all the buttons, and North,South,East,West,Center (can't remember what it is called) to create a GUI for a simple inventory program. Later I used NetBeans to make the GUI look a lot better but when I looked at the code that NetBeans created it was very confusing. I was just wondering what techniques do you guys and gals with experience in JAVA use to create a nice looking layout for a JAVA GUI. I know all the elements can be manually set by the x,y cordinates but is this really the best way? NetBeans feels like cheating to me because I am just learning and I feel like it does the work for me, but do most programmers use a IDE to create the GUI's? Thanks in advance.

I prefer writing the text code for a the functionality of a GUI; but for layout, the IDE is better for me. Simply put, I have no aesthetic abilities.

[mostyfriedman]

i HATE netbeans, the gui builder is crap.. am not much of a GUI artist but i can work fine with them..most of the time i set the layout to null and place the components manually..sometimes its a better idea to use a layout manager, depending on how i want the components to look and stuff

[xclite]

macosxnerd101, on 14 Aug, 2009 - 03:16 PM, said:

Simply put, I have no aesthetic abilities.

I'm with you on that. I can design simple stuff, but I'm no good at making things pleasing to the eye.

[Apokio]

Ok makes sense to me, depends on the project. The layout managers tend to look generic to me but I feel like I lose control when using netbeans. I will practice more with setting the layout to null and manually setting all the components. I know it really doesn't matter for a small GUI application but does manually coding the GUI use less resources than using a IDE like NetBeans?

[NeoTifa]

mostyfriedman, on 14 Aug, 2009 - 11:17 AM, said:

i HATE LOVE netbeans, but the gui builder is crap..

I fix. I code all my GUI myself.

[mostyfriedman]

NeoTifa, on 14 Aug, 2009 - 11:48 AM, said:

mostyfriedman, on 14 Aug, 2009 - 11:17 AM, said:

i HATE LOVE netbeans, but the gui builder is crap..

I fix. I code all my GUI myself.

eat my tits, netbeans suck

[horace]

Java GUI classes are fairly simple and easy to use so I build the GUI code myself. C++ is different - in the past I have used CBuilder and Visual Studio to build GUIs but these days tend to use Code::Blocks with wxWidgets and wxSmith as the GUI builder.

[pbl]

Use GUI generators for a quick shot or a proof of concept
but if you have write code that will have to be maintained stay away from them
This is a common practice in the industry