Visual Designers
Many graphical user-interfaces are built using standard widgets,
placed at fixed positions in a fixed-size window, or placed in a fixed
order and managed by a layout-manager.
A visual designer helps you to built such user-interfaces faster
than when writing the source code by hand, because it eliminates the need
for edit-compile-execute cycles to see the visual effect of source code
changes.
- A container (panel, frame, ...) is shown in which components
can be placed.
- Components can be selected from a palette and placed in the
container.
- The component's properties can be inspected and changed.
(Name, default value, size, colors, fonts etc. can all be changed.)
- Source code is generated automatically for the interface,
including event callbacks which still have to be completed by the programmer.
Two popular GUI Builders, Borland's JBuilder
and Symantec Visual Café
generate (dummy) callbacks,
but Sun's Java Workshop
(version 2.0) does not.