As V.P. of Product Development for Instantiations and project leader for our Eclipse-based WindowBuilder GUI tool, I am very concerned about the inaccuracies and misconceptions in your recent blog entry...
http://cld.blog-city.com/instantiations ... popula.htm
Another Eclipse company is offering NetBeans Swing-based Matisse support.
We are certainly not offering "NetBeans Swing-based Matisse support". What we are doing is offering support in Eclipse for the new GroupLayout layout manager that was initially created for Matisse and then open sourced. In fact, our support for GroupLayout and Swing GUI design in general is demonstrably better than what is in Matisse.
http://www.instantiations.com/windowbui ... hanMatisse
I should also note that we announced and started beta testing GroupLayout support back in December...well before Genuitec made their announcement (well before they even started their port of Matisse).
http://www.swt-designer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=740
Instantiations joins Genuitec in offering a NetBeans GUI Builder.
This is completely and unequivocal false. We are offering our own GUI builder built using Eclipse technology that now supports GroupLayout. We are not offering Matisse or any NetBeans GUI Builder.
All of this is more bad news for the Eclipse Visual Editor project which is watching Eclipse partners choosing to offer the popular NetBeans GUI Builder solution.
Since your premise is false, your conclusion is equally false. Here are some things you should be aware of:
o Our WindowBuilder product, while being a pure Eclipse solution, was never based on the Eclipse Visual Editor. Therefore, our addition of GroupLayout support is neither good news or bad news for the Eclipse Visual Editor project.
o We are absolutely not "choosing to offer the popular NetBeans GUI Builder". As our GUI tool was already demonstrably better than Matisse, that would be a foolish choice for us.
o You should not kid yourself that Genuitec did you any favors. Any perceived advantages that NetBeans might have had over Eclipse vis-a-vis Matisse were all but eliminated once Genuitec ported Matisse to Eclipse. No matter how you might wish it to be true, having Matisse available in Eclipse is not going to help drive any users to NetBeans. Why go to NetBeans to get GroupLayout support when you can get a native Eclipse implementation from us or a port of Matisse itself from Genuitec?
o The only thing that Matisse had going for it was its support for GroupLayout. Discounting that, the Eclipse Visual Editor is actually a much better Swing GUI development tool. If the Eclipse Visual Editor team decides to add support for GroupLayout (which then can do now that GroupLayout is open source), there would be no benefit at all to using Matisse over the Visual Editor.
o Without support for common third party layout managers like JGoodies FormLayout or even all of the common Swing layout managers like SpringLayout, Matisse is actually a mediocre choice for general Swing GUI development.
Both Instantiations and Genuitec are offering the option in their "professional" versions. This further popularizes the Swing API among Eclipse developers.
Our WindowBuilder tool supports both Swing and SWT. From a GUI development tool point of view, we are actually agnostic about which GUI API our customers choose. SWT already includes a layout manager, FormLayout, that is roughly comparable to the new Swing GroupLayout, so SWT users have already had this available for some time. In the event that some of our customers would like to directly use GroupLayout itself with SWT, we are in the process of porting GroupLayout to SWT (most existing Swing layout managers have already been ported to Swing in the past).
GroupLayout itself is not superior to what is already in SWT; it is simply different. GroupLayout has some nice characteristics like font base line support, but it also has some very bad characteristics like being nearly impossible to read. GroupLayout was designed to be a "write-only" layout manager in keeping with the one-way code generation tools in NetBeans/Matisse. It is far less appealing if you want to write Swing layout code by hand or modify/refactor the generated code.
It is probably too much to ask you to amend your blog entry, but I would ask you to be a bit more careful in describing what we have done in the future.
) has really taken the world by storm and has offered a layout manager (and GUI builder) that Swing developers are enjoying.
