Simon’s Blog

Since Netbeans 5.0 was released, I’ve been looking at Matisse to see if the hype surrounding the new graphical user interface design tool is justified. Java’s GUI system, Swing, is a super-powerful, flexible, cross-platform toolkit: there isn’t a better system for building sophisticated graphical interfaces. However, through the years, using graphical IDEs - such as JBuilder - has never been the best way to develop Java GUIs. The challenges relating to cross-platform support have always been too much for the IDEs. Thus, hand editing source code has always given the best results. Until now.

It’s always been a frustration that building simple, form-based interfaces has not particularly productive in Java compared, say, to using tools such as Visual Studio. That has been due, in large part, to the challenges that Java’s Layout Managers brought to the IDE party. With Matisse, I’m pleased to say that the Netbeans team has effectively solved the problem of building GUIs as easily (possibly more easily) as competing .NET tools.

What does that mean to you? It means, if you build almost any kind of GUIs in Java, and you care about your productivity, you really should be taking a look Netbeans 5.0. The team has done a great job with Matisse; it’s a truly impressive piece of work.