Matisse – the new NetBeans GUI Builder

Matisse – the new NetBeans GUI Builder looks quite nice from the demo screencast. Though it’s been several months since I was looking at the Eclipse GUI building tools, this is far ahead of those tools in ease-of-use. Very nice work!

I did see one comment that compared this with Apple’s Interface Builder. Something I didn’t see in Matisse (maybe it’s there, but it wasn’t in the screencast), is the data binding aspect of IB. Being able to draw a nice looking, internationalizable, resizable, cross-platform GUI is quite a trick… but, being able to also wire it up to your objects without a whole bunch of controller code is the bit of beauty you get from IB.

Perhaps the data binding of JDNC will get hooked up with a future version of the Netbeans GUI builder.