Eclipse, NetBeans Matisse, GroupLayout and the Amazing BeanNetter

posted Wednesday, 19 April 2006

I recently received an email which clarified further Instantiations support for Matisse's GroupLayout manager. The initial web site actually helped to confuse me and I suspect others by citing support for "Matisse GroupLayout". The Instantiations site has been updated and clarifies what they are doing. GroupLayout manager is a huge part of Matisse and it is now an open source project. So to be exact Instantiations now supports Matisse's GroupLayout manager. They provide their own complete Eclipse GUI builder. I will point you to this updated site so you can

see some of the work Instantiations is doing today. Clearly they are aiming to provide improved support for Swing in their UI Builder( which takes the form of an Eclipse plugin). One thing - I was aware of - but was further amplified is that they don't use Eclipse Visual Editor (or for that matter Matisse), instead providing their own very robust foundation that is able to support both SWT and Swing. They are claiming "better-than-Matisse - okay so I have my doubts and different views - but in any case I for one, think it is good news - especially because it is helping propel Swing's popularity. As well as it helps propel competion in this area - making stronger and better Swing tools and indirectly helping to promote Swing-based RCPs. All good things.

The support for GroupLayout manager in Instantiations UI builder and the support for Matisse in Genuitec's Matisse4MyEclipse is a huge boost for Swing (which is already dominant) as well as validating NetBeans' innovation. Interestingly GroupLayout is quickly becoming the GUI common denominator and a bridge between NetBeans and

Eclipse. This is a good thing. If the Eclipse Visual Editor Project moves to support GroupLayout - then this will further boost Swing. But that doesn't have to happen - Swing is already the dominant Java GUI API and the free NetBeans IDE offers a Matisse UI builder.

NetBeans will offer some very nice Matisse updates soon - you can read about them here. It will be interesting to see where all this goes. NetBeans innovative Matisse technologies like GroupLayout are now finding themselves being embedded into Eclipse implementations. Why ? Because developers want it and NetBeans' Matisse and GroupLayout have revolutionized Java GUI building and are further popularizing Swing. Like I said earlier - this is not especially a good thing if you are SWT proponent who would like to see more SWT RCP apps. Instead we are seeing more Swing apps and one benefiary may well be the NetBeans RCP. Meanwhile some SWT developers are hoping that one of the companies will use a Swing-based Matisse-like front-end to generate SWT. It would be a painful pill to swallow for some - a popular Swing-based GUI builder offering SWT code generation.

BeanNetter - New software. Tim added JDNC Components simply by converting JDNC JavaBeans automagically (by way of his JNLP app) into a NetBeans plugin and loading them into NetBeans via manual auto-update center. The new components end up in the component palette. See above.
Select the image to see Tim's write-up.

Now, all of this is interesting - but maybe something that happened last week looks like it may cause further serious problems for SWT. Tim Boudreau may have driven a stake into SWT with one brilliant piece of software. The allure of Matisse is not only the GUI builder - but the big view of what it offers and its potential. What it offers has become all to clear - it offers an elegant way and easy way to build sophisticated GUIs. It's potential came sharper into focus this week with two events - the release of a NetBeans Matisse Roadmap and a piece of software, BeanNetter, that allows for brain-dead-easy way to

I tried out BeanNetter and it worked very nicely - you can see from the above snapshot that I brought in JXDatePicker and JXMonthView components into Matisse's Design view.

add GUI components to the Matisse Component Palette. Tim Boudreau released a really very nice Java WebStart application which takes JavaBeans and converts them to NetBeans plugins. All of the Swing-based components in the form of JavaBeans ... and there are alot - can not only be converted to NetBeans plugins - but the software will also populate the

Component Palette with them. This accomplishment is stunning, just for it's implications. SWT is already way behind Swing in terms of available components, so for SWT this development is unwelcome - kind of like a magnitude 6 earthquake. It was already problematic that Matisse's popularity has submerged the Eclipse Visual Editor from view - but the software that Tim has unleashed allows for a flood of Swing components for NetBeans Matisse that further threatens to swamp the SWT boat. I took Tim's tool and was able to very quickly and automatically generate NetBeans plugins and then bring into NetBeans SwingLabs' components which ended up in the Component Palette where I could choose them and drag-and-drop them into the GUI layout area (see image above). Incidentally, Tim has written a blog entry about doing all of this the hard way.

The cool thing is that if you are using Matisse - you suddenly have available to you a great way to bring your components and some open source components into the NetBeans Component Palette. This tool further helps companies that offer Swing components another avenue to bring their components quickly into Matisse.

All of this is very exciting - the Swing rich client has now rapidly become the center stage and the competition in this area is great for not only better tools but also for popularizing Swing and Swing-based Rich Client Platforms.

links: digg this del.icio.us technorati

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Eclipse, NetBeans Matisse, GroupLayout and the Amazing BeanNetter