Re: Netbeans 6.1 visual web
Re: Netbeans 6.1 visual web
- Subject: Re: Netbeans 6.1 visual web
- From: Mike Schrag <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 21:01:49 -0400
This seems to take a shot at replacing Apple's WO as it has the GUI
and self coding features.
Please give me your comparative thoughts to WOlips
I'm not sure what you're looking to compare -- WO + Eclipse/WOLips to
JSF + NetBeans or just the IDE features of Eclipse/WOLips to the IDE
features of NetBeans? It's pretty hard to compare just the IDE
features, because each is very impacted by the architecture of the
framework being modeled (and each is really only applicable for its
own framework -- it's not like you can do WO development with NetBeans
VWP). If you go through the Netbeans VWP tutorial (http://www.netbeans.org/kb/55/vwp-intro.html
), they do some nice things, but the complexity of JSF shows through
to me. It seems to me they really only have a couple views that we
don't really address in WOLips -- one is the HTML design view (which I
assume is the primary reason you're bringing this up) and the other is
the navigation view (which is a concept that doesn't really map
directly onto how WO works like it does with navigation definitions in
JSF). I'm downloading NB to try it out so I can give the design mode
a fair assessment, but judging by the shots in the tutorials, I'm
_HIGHLY_ skeptical of it. I suspect it's going to suck in all the
same ways that WOB sucks (and then some). I've been through a bunch
of their tutorials and none them seem to talk about CSS at all, which
makes me think they're doing table layout (they talk about layout
managers similar to Swing/AWT, and it's possible those are implemented
in CSS, but I sort of doubt it -- I'll give them the chance to prove
me wrong, though).
[time passes] OK yeah, it's like a huge party and all the HTML tables
are invited. They actually do a reasonably good job of that, though,
and it doesn't COMPLETELY ignore div/style markup, but it appears all
of the components they show in demos are table-based. I'm suspecting
they have special-cased the rendering of the core components, but I'm
not _sure_ about that ([more time] yeah it does appear that they do --
the table webuijsf:tableRowGroup does a mock 4 row rendering sort of
like how the table component in IB does it). Of course there's also
the "Preview in Browser": http://skitch.com/mikeschrag/msgj/netbeans-ide-6.1
-- yikes. Not quite the fidelity I was hoping for :) All the demos
they show take the really simple cases, too. If you're taking a
basically flat layout, especially when it's designed with tables, it's
a much easier problem. When you start throwing in div/CSS-based
design and conditionals, things sort of hit the fan, and it's where I
ended up ... To make that not suck you really need to go a step
further. I think Seaside is the closest conceptually to what I think
will work. Java is the big roadblock here at the moment. JavaRebel
is getting really close to removing the barriers that are standing in
the way of making some very very cool tools, though with full editing
during runtime.
I'm FAR more impressed by Visual Studio 2008's web development tools
compared to NetBeans, though. To me, that's the one to steal from: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/06/mix08-session-overview-building-great-ajax-applications-from-scratch-using-asp-net-3-5-and-visual-studio-2008.aspx
. They have some excellent ideas in here, and their page renderer
is a full IE that actually addresses modern web design notions. I'm
also skeptical of how they approach sub-page-component design with CSS
(which is in many ways the hard part), but they do some very cool
things that I look forward to ripping off. Their approach to
Javascript editing is very Smalltalkish, and I give them a lot of
credit for tackling that problem the way they did -- it's pretty
awesome.
ms
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