Handcode GUI or use gui-designer tool [closed]

Answer 1

I do it by hand, it's a lot easier to shuffle things around and re-use panels inside the application (some panels can appear in several places).

Using a designer works when you're in a team the artists are supposed to do the GUI.

Finding the right element in big panel can be difficult.

?? I've never seen that.

Answer 2

I tend to think the right answer depends on the culture of the target platform. On OS X, Interface Builder is such an integral part of the tool chain that it's difficult to avoid it.

In Java (awt or swing), the reverse is really true. There is no toolchain support for this.

Really, the way you can tell, is the way the tools produce their outputs. Interface Builder produces .nib format files which are specific to the way Cocoa puts controls on the screen. It understands what is essentially an interface markup format. Java has no such similar concept. Everything is a compiled class, and therefor its much more difficult to get convenient results.

GTK+, when combined with glade, seems to strike a reasonable balance between the two.

Answer 3

I would always hand-code the GUI design where there is no standard (or de-facto standard) GUI markup language (as with Java). The reason for this is that I have found that usin a GUI builder design tool will tie you in to using a particular IDE. Over time, the best IDE for GUI design and/or writing code will change and each developer should be free to choose whichever IDE they feel most comfortable with.

Where I work at the moment, we have a lot of legacy GUIs which were written using Netbeans Matisse GUI builder (against my advice at the time :-). These are now almost unmaintainable because all of the developers prefer either IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse as their IDE. It is not realistsic or workable to have developers fire up Netbeans just to modify GUI layout (people don't keep the Netbeans project definitions in sync etc).

Another point is that the total time writing out GUI layout code is probably only 5% of the total development effort of a given project. Even if it takes you twice as long to write the code yourself, this doesn't translate as much of an overhead in the grand scheme of things. And it's a small price to pay for long-term maintainability.

As long as you are clear about separating out GUI layout logic from business logic, I don't believe anything suffers as a result. No-one here uses GUI builders any more!

Answer 4

If you are designing a business application with lots of entry forms and tabular data, writing code for your UI is both faster and more maintainable than using an UI designer. In those kinds of applications, there almost never need to precisely place one element at predefined place on screen, while on the other hand, there is a lots of repetition and design conventions that can simply be extracted into separate methods.

Take for example an Eclipse or OpenOffice preferences dialog. There are a bunch of categories and a bunch of different options to set for each. If you have to make something of that size, hand designing each screen is a mundane task. Much better approach is to write code which will generate UI elements on-the-fly, from provided domain data, according to some conventions and defaults.

I don't see how using a designer facilitates better separation, nor how that perceived separation would help with anything, given that you already keep your business logic out of the UI.

And, finally, if you're using Java, be sure to check out MigLayout. It works with Swing and SWT, its' syntax is very concise and clear, and it has a debug mode that's unbelievably useful.

Answer 5

It depends on the situation, really. I think both have their place, and I usually use a hybrid approach.

There are always some things that the GUI builder can't do (for example setting the color to a UIColor constant in Interface Builder). On the other hand, most of UI work is pretty mundane (for example adding static labels).

I prefer to do the mundane stuff in the GUI builder, and the more interesting stuff in code.

Also, I occasionally find myself editing the XML produced by the GUI builder (Interface Builder and glade in my case) by hand.