Hi All, I am biased.
The usages for Mattise/GroupLayout and MigLayout are very different and they should not be compared directly. But, manual coding with MigLayout and GUI coding using Matisse/GroupLayout (henceforth Mattise) can. Before I created MigLayout I did a few GUIs with Matisse. You can for instance see the result in the iCal demo for MiGCalendar.com . Unfortunately I didn't like it much. Neither do I like the Sun provided layout managers, so I created my own (NIH syndrome maybe..). Matisse has the very common problem of the lacking last 10% (and the built in LayoutManagers have the more uncommon problem of lacking the last 90% ;) I am very quality focused and every pixel must be right where it's supposed to be and I will redo the GUI if I come up with a better one. These two personal properties (intentional properties-for- Java plug) is what is making me lean towards manually coded GUIs rather than using Matisse. With Matisse you won't get exact control over the layout. If you are fine with its defaults or don't care exactly what happens if you resize the GUI you might be OK with this, but I found that the GUIs I wanted to create wasn't i the best interest of Matisse.. Also, if you want to move components around Matisse gets crazy. The crazyness is natural since in Matisse components are constrained to each other rather than to a grid or layout algorithm. Still, it is very troublesome if you want to change your GUI a lot, which I do. MigLayout approach the layout problem from the other side. It makes it very easy to code GUI by hand, BUT, and this is the difference compared to the built in ones, if you want total control it gives you that too. This means that you can get started quickly and can just slap a few components to the GUI with few extra characters, and later, when you want to tweak the GUI to get every white space and grow/shink behaviour just right, you just add the appropriate constraints. No need to change LayoutManager mid stream. Before MigLayout this meant that I always ended up using GridBagLayout in the end after starting out with FlowLayout or something. Another thing with Matisse is that it locks you into tools that support Matisse/GroupLayout since it is virtually impossible to code, or recode, it by hand. If you are sure that all your team members will always use NetBeans this isn't a problem though. Cheers, Mikael Grev On Jul 24, 2:06 am, Ernie MacNamara <[email protected]> wrote: > Guys, love the show. But please, stop singing the praises of Matisse > and GroupLayout whenver GUI development comes up. Look, I love > Netbeans and user it every day. Matisse is not the best it's not even > the easiest way of putting controls on the screen. Instead, replace > every mention of Matisse with MigLayout. It is the one and only layout > manager that any person developing a GUI should be using. > > Thanks! > > Ernie --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
