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Editable issues

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  Editable issues K <kalezwe@gmail.com> - 2013-01-28 21:19 -0800
    Re: Editable issues Mikhail Vladimirov <vladimirow@mail.ru> - 2013-01-28 22:21 -0800
      Re: Editable issues Peter Duniho <NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com> - 2013-01-28 23:17 -0800
        Re: Editable issues Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom2@eastlink.ca> - 2013-01-29 06:27 -0400
          Re: Editable issues Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-29 22:02 -0500
            Re: Editable issues Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom2@eastlink.ca> - 2013-01-30 07:38 -0400
              Re: Editable issues Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2013-01-30 08:32 -0800
                Re: Editable issues Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom2@eastlink.ca> - 2013-01-30 19:34 -0400
                  Re: Editable issues Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-30 20:04 -0500
                    Re: Editable issues Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom2@eastlink.ca> - 2013-01-31 06:21 -0400
                      Re: Editable issues Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-31 11:10 -0500
                Re: Editable issues Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-31 04:15 -0800
                  Re: Editable issues Peter Duniho <NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com> - 2013-01-31 07:26 -0800
                    Re: Editable issues Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-31 11:04 -0500
                      Re: Editable issues Peter Duniho <NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com> - 2013-01-31 16:54 -0800
                        Re: Editable issues Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom2@eastlink.ca> - 2013-02-01 04:59 -0400
                        Re: Editable issues Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-02-01 20:08 -0500
                          Re: Editable issues Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom2@eastlink.ca> - 2013-02-01 21:54 -0400
                            Re: Editable issues Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-02-02 12:21 -0500
                              Re: Editable issues Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom2@eastlink.ca> - 2013-02-02 15:37 -0400
                          Re: Editable issues Peter Duniho <NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com> - 2013-02-01 18:12 -0800
                            Re: Editable issues Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-02-01 20:33 -0800
                              Re: Editable issues Peter Duniho <NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com> - 2013-02-01 23:39 -0800
                            Re: Editable issues Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-02-02 12:16 -0500
                              Re: Editable issues Peter Duniho <NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com> - 2013-02-02 09:59 -0800
                                Re: Editable issues Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-02-02 21:05 -0500
                                  Re: Editable issues Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-02-04 14:18 -0800
                                    Re: Editable issues Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-02-04 18:23 -0500
                          Re: Editable issues Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net> - 2013-02-04 14:11 -0800
                            Re: Editable issues Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-02-04 18:17 -0500
                    Re: Editable issues Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-02-01 05:05 -0800
              Re: Editable issues Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2013-01-30 20:03 -0500
    Re: Editable issues Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2013-01-29 02:38 -0800

Page 2 of 2 — ← Prev page 1 [2]

#21997

On Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:08:10 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> [...]
> You have never heard of anyone using VS that wanted to do something
> for GUI that required manual editing??

Of the Designer-generated code?

Nope.

> [...]
> But I am convinced that the main reason for the low usage
> of Java for desktop apps is the look and feel not being
> sufficient native.

Well, I can't say I have data to dispute that. Far be it from me to try to
dissuade you of your opinion.

But it sure sounds like a pretty weak basis to me. If look-and-feel were so
important, more of the .NET community would have jumped on the WPF
bandwagon years ago, rather than continuing to write new WinForms apps
today in spite of its entirely dated look.

For my own part, if I had a Java toolset that worked as well as the Visual
Studio/.NET combination, I'd invest a lot more time coding in Java.
Granted, in that case it's not just the Designer. There are C# language
features missing from Java that I appreciate and love too much. But the
language feature issue is balanced somewhat by Java's superior
cross-platform story, so certainly the GUI-building tools (or lack thereof)
are a big part of what finally tips the scales in favor of .NET for me.

Pete

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#21998

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 18:12:21 -0800, Peter Duniho
<NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
someone who said :

>For my own part, if I had a Java toolset that worked as well as the Visual
>Studio/.NET combination

If you go that route, what do you think the lifetime of your code is
before either tools are dropped or evolve so your code no longer
works?

In HTML you do a lot of your layout with style sheets rather than
tweaking each component individually.  I think we need something
similar for desktop apps.  Maybe HTML 5 will evolve to fill that
niche.
-- 
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products http://mindprod.com
The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time.
The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development 
time. 
~ Tom Cargill  Ninety-ninety Law 

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#22001

On Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:33:11 -0800, Roedy Green wrote:

> On Fri, 1 Feb 2013 18:12:21 -0800, Peter Duniho
> <NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
> someone who said :
> 
>>For my own part, if I had a Java toolset that worked as well as the Visual
>>Studio/.NET combination
> 
> If you go that route, what do you think the lifetime of your code is
> before either tools are dropped or evolve so your code no longer
> works?

.NET Forms Designer has been around over a decade and so far there's no
sign support for it will be dropped. The underlying technology has been
around two decades. Microsoft has not been investing in WinForms, but even
with the push for Windows 8/HTML5-based development, .NET Forms hasn't been
abandoned.

Would a Java tool enjoy such longevity? I have no idea. But the only reason
that there even seems like a possibility .NET Forms would eventually not be
supported in the IDE is that there's a new "latest, greatest" GUI toolset
to replace it. It's not like I'd be forced to go backwards.

In any case, lack of support going forward doesn't mean having to
completely abandon existing tools and code-bases. VB.NET supplanted the
non-.NET version of Visual Basic over a decade ago, and I still
occasionally see questions from people just now getting around to porting
their old VB code to .NET. They've been using VB6 all this time, with the
same old compilers and designers they were using in the 90s.

It's not like when .NET came along, all their old code just automatically
stopped working.

> In HTML you do a lot of your layout with style sheets rather than
> tweaking each component individually.  I think we need something
> similar for desktop apps.  Maybe HTML 5 will evolve to fill that
> niche.

Maybe. WPF uses a similar paradigm, and it was all the rage with new
Windows GUI devs until Windows 8/Metro came along. I'm a bit behind the
curve, but I gather that the XML-based "XAML" markup type has bifurcated
into the WPF-centric "XAML original" and a new XAML language, wholly
independent of WPF itself, to support Windows 8 development.

I also haven't been following HTML5 closely. But earlier versions of HTML
have the deficiency with respect to desktop apps that they aren't great at
absolute-positioned layout. For the web, that's a great feature, but for a
desktop app, the constant reflowing of text, shifting of bitmaps, etc. can
be a big liability.

In any case, if HTML5 winds up being part of the new desktop paradigm, I'm
still going to want good integrated GUI design tools to go with it, where I
can easily couple my GUI with my code's implementation details, in a
seamless, maintainable way.

Even for simple HTML, hand-coding is for the birds. I do it, but only
because I don't have to maintain a lot of HTML. And in fact, the one
scenario where I _do_ have a large volume of HTML to deal with, I wrote an
XSLT-based tool to auto-generate the HTML.

So, no doubt...if I wind up having to use HTML of any sort for GUI design,
I'm going to want tools that automate and simplify the grunt work for me.

Pete

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#22011

On 2/1/2013 9:12 PM, Peter Duniho wrote:
> On Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:08:10 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> [...]
>> But I am convinced that the main reason for the low usage
>> of Java for desktop apps is the look and feel not being
>> sufficient native.
>
> Well, I can't say I have data to dispute that. Far be it from me to try to
> dissuade you of your opinion.
>
> But it sure sounds like a pretty weak basis to me. If look-and-feel were so
> important, more of the .NET community would have jumped on the WPF
> bandwagon years ago, rather than continuing to write new WinForms apps
> today in spite of its entirely dated look.

WinForms may look dated, but it is still very Windows like.

> For my own part, if I had a Java toolset that worked as well as the Visual
> Studio/.NET combination, I'd invest a lot more time coding in Java.
> Granted, in that case it's not just the Designer. There are C# language
> features missing from Java that I appreciate and love too much. But the
> language feature issue is balanced somewhat by Java's superior
> cross-platform story, so certainly the GUI-building tools (or lack thereof)
> are a big part of what finally tips the scales in favor of .NET for me.

What did you try? JBuilder? NetBeans Matisse? Eclipse VE? Eclipse 
WindowsBuilder?

Arne

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#22015

On Sat, 02 Feb 2013 12:16:37 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> WinForms may look dated, but it is still very Windows like.

I have found Java on the Mac and on Windows sufficiently "native-looking"
for my tastes.

YMMV.

> What did you try? JBuilder? NetBeans Matisse? Eclipse VE? Eclipse 
> WindowsBuilder?

This was several years ago. The only workable GUI building tool I could
find at the time was built into NetBeans. And it wasn't that good. I also
didn't like the NetBeans IDE as much as Eclipse, and the GUI tool wasn't
good enough for me to feel it was worth trading off the other usability
differences that otherwise made Eclipse better for me.

There was something that seemed like it should have worked for Eclipse, but
by the time I'd tried to use it, it appeared no one was working on it and I
wasn't able to get it working in the version of Eclipse I was using. Sorry,
I don't recall which one it was.

Who knows? Maybe the tools are better today. Maybe NetBeans itself is
easier to use, and/or maybe the GUI designer in it is nicer. But that's the
state things were in when I'd tried to use Java for GUI development.

Still, the lack of a strong defense in favor of GUI development in Java,
and indeed your own suggestion that most Java developers prefer to
hand-code their GUIs anyway, suggest to me that things haven't really
changed that much in the intervening years.

Pete

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#22034

On 2/2/2013 12:59 PM, Peter Duniho wrote:
> On Sat, 02 Feb 2013 12:16:37 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> What did you try? JBuilder? NetBeans Matisse? Eclipse VE? Eclipse
>> WindowsBuilder?
>
> This was several years ago. The only workable GUI building tool I could
> find at the time was built into NetBeans. And it wasn't that good. I also
> didn't like the NetBeans IDE as much as Eclipse, and the GUI tool wasn't
> good enough for me to feel it was worth trading off the other usability
> differences that otherwise made Eclipse better for me.
>
> There was something that seemed like it should have worked for Eclipse, but
> by the time I'd tried to use it, it appeared no one was working on it and I
> wasn't able to get it working in the version of Eclipse I was using. Sorry,
> I don't recall which one it was.

Sounds like VE.

 > Who knows? Maybe the tools are better today. Maybe NetBeans itself is
 > easier to use, and/or maybe the GUI designer in it is nicer. But 
that's the
 > state things were in when I'd tried to use Java for GUI development.
 >
 > Still, the lack of a strong defense in favor of GUI development in Java,
 > and indeed your own suggestion that most Java developers prefer to
 > hand-code their GUIs anyway, suggest to me that things haven't really
 > changed that much in the intervening years.

WindowBuilder is supposedly a bit better.

It was a commercial product, but when Google acquired the company
they opensourced it.

But that tool it not widely used either.

We see practically no questions about it here.

A quick check on StackOverflow revealed 133 questions
tagged WindowBuilder and 22752 questions tagged Swing.

Arne

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#22089

On Sat, 02 Feb 2013 21:05:13 -0500, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk>
wrote:

[snip]

>WindowBuilder is supposedly a bit better.
>
>It was a commercial product, but when Google acquired the company
>they opensourced it.
>
>But that tool it not widely used either.
>
>We see practically no questions about it here.
>
>A quick check on StackOverflow revealed 133 questions
>tagged WindowBuilder and 22752 questions tagged Swing.

     I do not challenge your statement of width of use, but ...

     Since something that is easy to use would tend to have fewer
questions per capita, the raw number of questions is not as indicative
as you might think.

     I saw how rec.arts-int-fiction got turned into little more than
an Inform 7 support group.  I recall one poster stating that the
language made it very easy to do easy things, but if what one wanted
to do was off the beaten track, it could be quite difficult.  And we
saw a lot of questions.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

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#22094

On 2/4/2013 5:18 PM, Gene Wirchenko wrote:
> On Sat, 02 Feb 2013 21:05:13 -0500, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk>
> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>> WindowBuilder is supposedly a bit better.
>>
>> It was a commercial product, but when Google acquired the company
>> they opensourced it.
>>
>> But that tool it not widely used either.
>>
>> We see practically no questions about it here.
>>
>> A quick check on StackOverflow revealed 133 questions
>> tagged WindowBuilder and 22752 questions tagged Swing.
>
>       I do not challenge your statement of width of use, but ...
>
>       Since something that is easy to use would tend to have fewer
> questions per capita, the raw number of questions is not as indicative
> as you might think.

Number of questions is affected by both ease of use (easy to use
features create less questions than hard to use) and by
life cycle status (new features create more questions than old
features). So I would not conclude much if it is x2 or x0.5, but
I will conclude from x100.

Arne

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#22088

On Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:08:10 -0500, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk>
wrote:

[snip]

>But I am convinced that the main reason for the low usage
>of Java for desktop apps is the look and feel not being
>sufficient native.

     And that the coding side of it is also weird and for no or little
perceived benefit.  That is my view based on a basic look.  YMMV.

     I would like to be able to say exactly where things will go.
Aesthetics are part of it.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

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#22093

On 2/4/2013 5:11 PM, Gene Wirchenko wrote:
> On Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:08:10 -0500, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk>
> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>> But I am convinced that the main reason for the low usage
>> of Java for desktop apps is the look and feel not being
>> sufficient native.
>
>       And that the coding side of it is also weird and for no or little
> perceived benefit.

Coding wise I don't see it as that different.

It was how things were done before separation in ML and code
became common.

.NET Win Forms uses many of the same paradigms.

AWT and Swing's emphasis on layout manager may be a bit different,
but other frameworks typical have something similar, so I don't see
it as much of a difference in paradigm driven by API, but more like
a difference in paradigm driven by culture.

Arne

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#21953

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 07:26:22 -0800, Peter Duniho
<NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
someone who said :

>This may be true of poorly designed GUI editors

I tired out Symantec's many moons ago and have been shy ever since.  I
think a similar thing happened with SCIDS where programs are
maintained as parse trees.  Early efforts frightened people off.
-- 
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products http://mindprod.com
The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time.
The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development 
time. 
~ Tom Cargill  Ninety-ninety Law 

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#21892

On 1/30/2013 6:38 AM, Arved Sandstrom wrote:
> On 01/29/2013 11:02 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 1/29/2013 5:27 AM, Arved Sandstrom wrote:
>>> Main problem here is that in 2013 we still have people hand-cranking
>>> Swing code. It's ugly, tedious, unedifying, error-prone code. It's worse
>>> than JSF boilerplate and that's saying quite a lot.
>>>
>>> .NET tooling has Java beat in this regard.
>>
>> I strongly suspect that it is not:
>>
>> lack of GUI builder tools => desire to hand write Swing code
>>
>> but instead:
>>
>> desire to hand write Swing code => lack of GUI builder tools
>>
> If I parse your English correctly, Arne, you're suggesting that folks
> *prefer* to code Swing directly rather than make use of GUI builder
> interfaces?

Correct.

> Man, I'm not sure I buy that. I've suffered through writing Swing code
> from scratch a few times, I don't see how it's any more useful to do
> that than hand-coding JSF Facelets .xhtml and backing bean boilerplate.
> Which is to say, not useful at all. You gain nothing over using GUI
> builder tools, and you lose time better spent on real logic.

A GUI builder is very fast to create something that from
simple to medium complexity. But if you need to create
something of high complexity you often end up having to
work around the GUI builder.

The generated code is usually much harder to read when
debugging.

And if you change IDE you risk to loose the capability
on existing code.

Anyway - there has been several GUI builders for Java.
JBuilder had one. NetBeans has tried twice I believe.
Eclipse has tried twice. No success. No widespread
usage.

And note that it is not really Java that is different
from the rest. It is really MS that is different from
the rest. GUI builders are not common in PHP, various X
etc..

Arne

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#21833

On Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:19:03 -0800 (PST), K <kalezwe@gmail.com> wrote,
quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

>I made a java program and can't figure out why my uneditable text can still be edited

see sample code at http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jpasswordfield.html

it works fine with setEditable( false )

You made an error that would not likely have happened with more
meaningful names for your variables:

              item3 = new JTextField("Enter text here");
	item3.setEditable(false); <-- you meant true
	item4 = new JTextField("Can't edit", 20);
	item3.setEditable(false);  <-- you meant item4

let me rename the vars:

              canEnter= new JTextField("Enter text here");
	canEnter.setEditable(false); <-- you meant true
	cantEnter= new JTextField("Can't edit", 20);
	canEnter.setEditable(false);  <-- you meant cantEnter
-- 
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products http://mindprod.com
The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time.
The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development 
time. 
~ Tom Cargill  Ninety-ninety Law 

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