Re: Java vs. Objective-C for Cocoa

FROM : Don Yacktman
DATE : Sat Apr 23 01:53:08 2005

On Apr 22, 2005, at 4:16 PM, Zacharias J. Beckman wrote:
> Personally, I'm hoping that a future version of IB will include an
> IBLayout for Java, and then thank goodness, we would be able to use
> native IB to create our Java UIs. I sure wish Apple would do it
> already... ;-)


Back in the NEXTSTEP days there was an IB palette you could use to
generate Java UIs.  You'd lay out all the controls and stuff the way
you wanted, and then you would ask it to generate the necessary code. 
It would create a window class with some useful stubs that you could
subclass and use pretty easily.  I used it on several projects and it
worked great.  (This was long ago enough that it used AWT, because
Swing didn't even exist at the time!)

I'm sure some enterprising soul could create a similar IB palette for
Swing objects pretty easily if they wanted it bad enough.  The approach
is a bit of a hack, and it is still just code generation and not as
nice as what IB gives you for Cocoa.  And forget about connecting
objects together.  But at least you could use IB to maintain the UI if
you followed the instructions (ie, don't modify the generated object's
code -- always subclass it, so that a new file could be generated
later).

--
Later,

Don Yacktman
<email_removed>