More on the Amazing IntelliJ IDEA
Technology April 20th, 2007When I code Java Swing UIs, I often use Karsten Lentzsch’s excellent JGoodies Forms library to scale my pixel measurements in accordance with the font DPI setting of the underlying operating system (e.g., to properly support Windows’ “Large Fonts” setting). This is done by employing a symbolic measurement unit called a “DLU” (dialog unit) in place of pixels at design-time and then converting the DLU value to a pixel value at run-time.
An unfortunate aspect of the library’s design is that I have to invoke separate methods for converting the units along the X-axis and Y-axis (i.e., I invoke Sizes.dialogUnitXAsPixel and Sizes.dialogUnitYAsPixel). This lends itself to many a subtle bug.
To my amazement, my trusty IDEA was once again one step ahead of me:
Notice in the overly-small screen-shot above that I’m passing a constant containing the word “HEIGHT” into a method that’s expecting a unit value along the X axis. I’m not sure what algorithm IDEA employs to figure this out, but I say again, wow.
Once again, money well spent.
April 23rd, 2007 at 11:12 am
I suspect it’s just making an educated guess that something with ‘height’ in it shouldn’t be interchanged with ‘width’. Some of the plural-ized variable names it comes up with when expanding iterator templates can be shocking
I did dip into their GUI builder the other day and noticed it had ClientProperties for a JLabel that’d let me toggle the HTML rendering on & off - Didn’t know where it’d gotten that from. Still can’t get on with their GUI Builder - I was only seeing what I’d broken remapping .form files to xml and creating an .ijfrom type instead. This’ll let me hack Matisse form files in their xml editor instead of complaining they’re all malformed IntelliJ ones.
- Richard
April 23rd, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Richard: Yeah, I’ve never been a fan of their GUI builder. I use the JFormDesigner plug-in. I’ve not worked much with Matisse as I design my layouts in terms of grids, not related component groups, but I certainly respect it.
April 24th, 2007 at 6:23 am
Hello Ben, you might want to try MiG Layout. It has a unit “logical pixel” that is DLU but in normal DPI one pixel is one pixel. With MiG Layout you can also set this to be default if you like so that you can write “wmin 100″ instead of “wmin 100lp”. You can also use percentages of container or screen which is good if you want to make DPI resistant GUIs. MiG Layout has all the features of FormLayout but also a whole slew more. www.miglayout.com.
Cheers,
Mikael Grev
April 24th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Well, if there would be some kind of visually configurable layout manager for the MiG Layout which generates code in IDEA (like for our own, internally used layout manager), then I would like to switch. We don’t like to use “classic” GUI designers, because they are too limited in some aspects and allow to much in others compared to coding.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Thomas, actually there will be very soon. JFormDesigner is a standalone GUI designer that now also exists as a plugin for IDEA and Eclipse. They are currently adding support for MiG Layout and it will produce correct code afaik.