It seems like there are more visual GUI builder products available on the market today than ever before. Visual GUI builders propose an easier way to design and create user interface components. They usually consist of a palette from which you select and drag controls or widgets onto a window, frame, or dialog. Then they provide a table or list where you can manipulate the properties of your controls (size, font, color, coordinates, etc) without requiring the user to know the subtleties’ of the syntax or layout managers. Here is a really good link if you are interested in
Java GUI Builders.
Call me old fashion, but I always prefer a language editor (HTML, XML, Java, etc…) over a visual editor because I want to understand the commands I write, and I want to format and organize the code in a way that is meaningful to me so I can easily edit the code later. A good language editor will have syntax highlighting, syntax checking, command completion and various other features to assist you in developing the code, but it won’t generate the substance of the code for you.
Another type of code generation tool falls into the Model Driven Development (MDA) category. With MDD, logical models are used to capture design decisions and generate code, and sometimes the generated code is user interface code. The problem I have with user interfaces generated from models is that there is no consideration by the machine for who the user is, their technical aptitude, or the way they approach a task (workflow). The entire human experience is missing and the user interface has been reduced to a bunch of domain objects and business rules.
For example, the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) can use a model to quickly generate a cool looking prototype consisting of a relational tree, object listeners, pop-up menus, and a properties view, but this in no way resembles a complex, well designed, user friendly application. And don’t be fooled into thinking you can easily tweak the generated code to get it to behave the way you want it to. I’ve spent hours and hours digging thru layers and layers of cryptic machine generated code trying to find the one line that needs to be changed to get the desired behavior.
There are plenty of MDD advocates out there who will disagree with me. Most of them are experts in modeling, but I’ve never met one who is an expert in user interface design. Since most project leads and architects today are very familiar with UML and modeling tools they often buy into the promise that MDD will save them time on their UI development. This has not been my experience.
If you do choose to use a modeling tool to generate UI code – I recommend you decouple the UI model from the back-end model. Just imagine a project where every time the back-end architect decides to change a relationship in the model the UI mysteriously breaks with no warnings.
“And that’s all I have to say about that.”
-Shawn
In Java GUI, Eclipse
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