Handcode GUI or use gui-designer tool [closed]

Answer 1

Nothing prevents from mixing the two approaches. I often make the main layout of a form in a GUI designer (because it's quick and you see what you're doing), and put there one or more panels which are then populated with code. This is especially useful when the GUI must adapt to specific situations - for instance, if the GUI must change according to what hardware is connected.

In any case, the most important thing is indeed to keep GUI and application logic separate.

Answer 2

I would strongly advice you to use Interface Builder on OS X. Doing it by hand is fine if you want to learn, but you're going to save yourself a lot of headaches by using it on actual projects. It really is quite powerful.

As for Java and C++, it depends on what you're doing and on what platforms. For simple applications you can get away with never seeing the UI code. However, for complicated applications and rich clients, you typically have to do some of the code by hand.

Answer 3

Funny enough it has gone the other way round for me. Talking from Winforms perspective, the code generated by the designer is quite noisy, with maybe a quarter or half of all the property settings really necessary. Making pretty big controls is also more of a temptation when working with a designer. Changing some hierarchy of controls in the Winforms designer is quite a nightmare in my eyes.

In my last project I have created additional APIs to set up splitters in forms, dockmanagers, menus, toolbars etc. in a declarative fashion. These are such that they will further enforce separation of concerns.

I also try to rely much more on auto-layout features which admittedly are a lot nicer in WPF but can also go some way in Windows Forms.

Answer 4

I feel strongly that you should use an interface builder instead of hand-coding a GUI. As in the question mentioned it's a much cleaner separation and once something has to be edited it's much easier.

The Qt Designer got this feature to create a class out of a .ui file₁₎, but I think that not using this feature is the best way, as this creates just more coded that shouldn't exist at all. The speed issue of creating the window from a .ui-file is negligible because the window has to be loaded only once.

This is PyQt, but something similar is possible in C++:

class SelectDateDialog(QDialog):
    def __init__(self):
        QDialog.__init__(self)
        uic.loadUi("resources/SelectDate.ui", self)

Essentially this has the same effect as including all your UI-code into the __init__() method, but the UI is almost completely separated from the code.

¹⁾.ui files are XML files that describe a user interface

Answer 5

Hand coding can be good if you want some non-standard features included in you UI. You have more flexibility, but you will need to invest more time to create a good interface, because Java/C++ are language not mean to target UI design.

On the plus if you have a revision control you can look at the history of changes, something that can't be done with a designed that uses a binary format, or an xml format which is not RCS friendly.

Today most of the available tools to visually design an UI have missing some features. They are not flexible enough, some features can only be attained coding them. Also in some cases the generated code is not really human friendly, and if you modify by hand you may no longer be able to continue using the designer.

But the designed can be really a time saver if the design is simple, and we can hope designers will be improved in the future, but I will not hold by breadth.

My conclusion is if you need flexibility today you will have to code by hand the interface, if you want something simple and fast then designer is the best choice.

Perhaps in the future the designers will be more powerful, or perhaps there will be new languages specialized in the UI design which will be more suitable for use in C++/Java, something like XUL or XAML.

Answer 6

My view on this: 1. Hand-coded GUI code is much more reusable 2. Layout issues are simpler with designers