In Swing GUI development, do you code by yourself or use power tools?

[www]

Hi,

In writing Swing GUI programs, I have seen people write the code line by
line. I also found that there are a number of Swing GUI development
tools available (some are free, some are not). Using those tools, you
just need to drag a button, drop to the client platform, etc. And code
will be generated for you automatically.

I am curious what is advantage/disadvantage for the two choices.

Actually, my project leader use the first method - code line by line.
The GUI he developed is not trivial. Now we need to make some
modification to the GUI. I have to code line by line, correct?

 

[wesley.hall]

Hi,

In writing Swing GUI programs, I have seen people write the code line by
line. I also found that there are a number of Swing GUI development
tools available (some are free, some are not). Using those tools, you
just need to drag a button, drop to the client platform, etc. And code
will be generated for you automatically.

I am curious what is advantage/disadvantage for the two choices.

Actually, my project leader use the first method - code line by line.
The GUI he developed is not trivial. Now we need to make some
modification to the GUI. I have to code line by line, correct?

You probably don't HAVE to but you would be wise to. GUI builders are
vastly overrated. Your project lead presumably knows this.

GUI builders can do some terrible things, like absolute positioning of
widgets. In coding GUIs manually you will get into the habbit of
laying your GUIs out in groups of components inside panels which will
make maintainance much easier and enable options for reuse. It is easy
to neglect this when using WYSIWYG tools.

Coding swing by hand is not difficult anyway, it is just another API.
There are some oddities that you will need to pick up, but mostly your
builder will not help you with these either....