While I’m on the topic of Matisse…
I spoke today with Eric Clayberg from Instantiations. Eric is superhuman.
Instantiation’s Swing Designer now supports the GroupLayout layout manager that’s a huge part of fuss around Matisse (and a new addition to Mustang). It’s first class support that demos very very well. But it’s Eric’s brilliance that makes this even more wonderful… As with every other layout manager in Swing Designer (and SWT Designer), there is full support for roundtripping: you can change the code and have the changes reflected immediately in the visual editor. There’s no need for the “.form” file that Matisse requires to keep track of GUI information; Swing Designer works directly from the code, so you can actually import user interfaces from other tools (like Matisse).
There’s a lot of other cool things in WindowBuilder, like support for building perspectives, forms API-based windows. And… in a fit of nostalgia, they’ve resurrected the old Smalltalk WindowBuilder Pro graphic. Now that takes me back (and make me remember how much I miss Smalltalk… ).
Eric’s joining me in the expo at Linux World on April 5th. So if you missed him at EclipseCon, you can catch him there!
