Java Reference
In-Depth Information
10.8 Summary
IDEA
has done an excellent job of making Swing
GUI
design and implementation
more efficient. Implementing
GUI
s by hand is tedious work for developers skilled
in those libraries and downright frustrating for those developers new to them.
Other
IDE
vendors' previous attempts at solving this problem have resulted in
graphical design workspaces crippled by poor performance, or a total inability to
edit the generated code, or an attempt at a visual medium for defining function-
ality that wasn't sufficient for the needs of its audience.
IDEA
avoids these pitfalls by providing an
enabling
technology: an abstraction
layer atop the Swing code that lets you handle the tedious parts of the process
quickly—fighting with layout managers and layers of containers to make the
UI
look right—without attempting to handle the parts in the process that need the
full flexibility of the Java language—integration of the
UI
to functionality.
Finally, in courteous recognition of the need to work within a process that
might not be
IDEA
-pervasive, the
IDE
doesn't demand that you design forms
using this feature. You're free to build them by hand if you wish. And the
GUI
Designer tool can be used to generate a
UI
that is then refactored and reworked
in such a way that the
GUI
Designer no longer needs to maintain it.
IDEA
's solu-
tion for the design and implementation of
GUI
s is a flexible and robust system
that you'll find relatively easy to fit into your specific development needs.