Matisse or Jigloo?

Question

We have a dilemma; developing desktop application using Matisse or Jigloo..

Matisse has this XML form files which we are afraid of maintaining later, we don't even know should MyEclipse further support Matisse, even Netbeans - do you think they will give up OS support of Matisse?

More or less Jigloo and Matisse have similar behaviour, although Jigloo obeys more designers wish, Matisse has this strange alignment behaviour from time to time.

Jigloo generates Java code which can be edited and which in turn can cause visual editor not being able to draw form. That is probably the reason why Matisse wants to have definition of elements in more stable XML form from which it generates java code.

Matisse would not help much if there is an error in instantiating a GUI element, so putting custom elements can be also nightmare.

When typing code in Jigloo, the visual editor likes to erase picture so you have to wait for picture to show up after editing code. In Matisse you can have errors in class and still editing GUI.

Please help us by voting, what do you prefer more and why.

Answer 1

Please don't use either! As with this answer, it's my strong opinion (after writing Swing GUIs for 10 years), that using GUI builders is, in all but the most edge-cases, a bad idea. HAND CODE YOUR GUI!

• Whether you choose Matisse or Jigloo, it is not a standard, will fall out of favour and a better tool will come along. At that point, you will have legacy code that is nigh on impossible to maintain. This has already happened several times in the history of Java GUI builders.

• You should avoid forcing your developers to use one IDE and it is a huge overhead to expect devs to switch to a particular IDE when looking at the GUI code. They'll be frustrated as they can't remember key bindings, project setup is out-of-date, they have the wrong version installed etc. People will make quick-fixes without the builder. At this point your code is unmaintainable in both your IDE of choice, and in the GUI builder istelf! The whole thing is a mess.

• Designing a GUI is not, in my experience, a particularly onerous task and probably accounts for no more than 5-10% of the total development time of an application. Even if initially using Matisse or Jigloo provides you with a 50% time advantage over hand-coding the GUI, this is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It is certainly not worth the hidden costs and impending maintenance disasters that lie ahead.

• GridBagLayout is not hard. It just isn't! It's really simple, in fact. It will take you a few minutes to learn and after that you'll never look back. Your GUIs will look like how you want them to look and your code will be more maintainable as a result. Use GridBagLayout!

I have spent a good deal of time warning people about this before and been proven correct.

Answer 2

I have personally had a handful of occasions where the XML file backing a Matisse form somehow became out of sync with the code and had to resort to a backup to get it working again. This was enough to scare me away. I have no experience with Jigloo, though.

My current projects use TableLayout, extensively. It is easy to understand and (of all the layout managers I've tried) maintain. I have not found any other solution in GUI design for Java that I feel more comfortable with than coding the GUIs by hand. Moving forward, it seems like the best "future-proof" way of coding my GUIs.

I agree with Chintan on using Matisse or similar to mock up your design and then convert the layout to another layout (like TableLayout). Personally, I like using pencil and paper to do most of it. Not exactly high-tech, but it gets the job done.

Answer 3

I wouldn't go with either. The best thing I've found so far is Instantiations Swing Designer. It is not free, but not expensive either. It supports all major Swing layouts and DOES NOT create any additional artifacts except pure Java code.

Here is the link, if your are interested.

Answer 4

I would prefer Matisse since Netbeans is backed by Sun Microsystems and the possibility of the project being scrapped in the near futures seems blissfully low.

Also, I do not know the size of your project but I have developed some small ones and I personally use matisse to see how the layout would look and then go ahead and code everything using the Miglayout library. It increases the amount of coding a lot but gives good control and flexibility. And there is a possibility this library might be included in Java 7, consequently embedded into Matisse.