JavaGuiBuilding

We're doing some UI work at the moment, and for one reason or another it can't be tied to any particular GUI builder tool. Now the prevailing wisdom is that GUIs are just a bunch of boilerplate and the best way to build them is to draw the pictures then let your IDE churn out the code. Of course, that results in code that can only be maintained sensibly through that very tool. Andwe can't let that happen.

So we draw the pictures in the tool in order to get the layout right, then write the code by hand. And what we're getting to, very rapidly, is little hierarchies like this: AboutBox? extends FixedSizeModalPopup? extends Dialog. And the mesh of associations betwene hierachies that let us build the whole app.

Once these classes are found, introducing a new use, say HelpBox? is very, very quick, and the whole thing is human maintainable. I'm starting to think that we'll end up with a body of code that's smaller than the code-generated stuff, and might even run faster. I'll report back on that. -- KeithB

Interesting, on a slightly related note JoeWalnes has mentioned ThoughtWorks have made a tool for building test scripts for Swing UI's. OliBye thinks any UI framework should include tests to make building these sort of recorded functional tests easy (so that a customer can do them).

Interesting. We have a version of J2MEUnit, that, on our CLDC implementation only of course, can generate UI events. That's somewhat different, but serves a similar end. -- KeithB