On Wed, 25 Sep 2013, Holger Gast wrote:
In reality, due to its long history and high practical relevance, UI
programming is one of the best understood areas in software development.
The available tool support (Netbeans' Matisse or Eclipse's
WindowBuilder) makes it very simple to get panels up quickly. The
editing frameworks of both Netbeans and Eclipse are very mature. As long
as one adheres conscientiously to the contracts stated in the
frameworks' documentation, there's no need to understand the sources.
This is probably quoted from some marketing brochure.
In reality it works differently: guessing how it actually works, Googling,
asking on forums, asking of stackexchange, looking through sources (if
available).
The reason why this strange "mainstream" stuff like Java and Swing is
still being used successfully is the amount of explanations found on the
Web.
I3P has (long since) become a reality and has actually been used by
others, in different environments, and has even been built upon in Matej
Urbas' Diabelli project [1].
So is I3P still maintained? Its latest release is for Isabelle2012 --
10.6.2012.
Since I3P uses "APIs" of Isabelle that were never public, have changed
several times, and are about to disappear, it is getting more and more
difficult.
Thanks to the well-designed and stable Netbeans infrastructure, there
have never been any portability problems.
Netbeans is in the same boat with Swing incompatibilities. It is actually
the Netbeans community that is most active to point out to Oracle what is
still missing to make it half-decent on all platforms. This is also how
proper support for Mac OS X Retina displays now got into jdk-7u40 -- only
with > 6 months delay, so really quick for Java standards. I think they
did that relatively promptly, because bad visual quality is immediately
visible to anybody, without understanding general software quality.
Makarius
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