I have just started doing some volunteer work for a Christian Organisation, putting together a simple computer based contact form, that they will be able to use in small displays in conferences and the like.

The initial idea that was expressed was that they would want an “Access Database” to do it. This translates this to having a form to capture the data, and a way of retrieving it later.

Being most productive in Java and IntelliJ, I figured that I would give the GUI editor a quick go (If you’ve got a hammer everything must be a nail ;)).

I haven’t used it since having a bit of a play a few months ago in the EAP, and found that it has improved immensely. It’s not quite perfect, but works very well. It does a good job of focusing on the view keeping the controller and model separate.

You edit the view with the standard Canvas metaphor. There is a property editor for editing the standard bean properties of components, and a navigator allowing browsing of the layout. The definition of the view is stored in an XML file, which is then used to generate either a Java class or bytecode depending on your preference.

The hooking up of the screen to a underlying Java class is really quite nice. You assign the form to a class (type in the name and if the class doesn’t exist you get the option to create it), and then follow the same approach for the properties. The online documentation makes it easy to learn how to do the normal things like grouping a collection of radio buttons.

When wanting to introduce a JScrollPane, I found some of the drag and dropping didn’t quite work as I expected, after a bit of hacking and things not working as I thought they would, I took a quick look at the underlying XML file. It was easy to read and understand, allowing direct editing with a text editor, 5 Seconds later and my Panel was inside a JScrollPane.

The Editor isn’t quite perfect yet, but it is well on the way. Support for editing an attribute on a group of components at the same time would be nice, as well as improved drag and drop in the form navigation panel.

Overall I found that the form editor made developing a GUI a pleasure. It was much more fun that Forms development with a package produced by a leading database company 5 years ago. I look forward to using the 4.1 version of the IntelliJ UI builder.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 11th, 2004 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.