[TG-GHT]

Dear MyEclipse Support Team!

Is there any information whether and how the donation of WindowBuilder by Google to Eclipse will affect the support of Matisse in MyEclipse.

That is will for example Matisse support be abandoned in favour of WindowBuilder or will both be available side by side?

Looking forward to hearing from you and once again thank you very much for your effort and this great IDE 🙂

[support-swapna]

tog,

I have escalated it to the concerned team member. They will get back to you.

Thanks.

[Scott Anderson]

tog,

That’s an excellent question. From the time we launched MyEclipse our goal has simply been to provide our customers the best tools and support at a very reasonable price.

The WindowBuilder contribution (Swing Designer and SWT Designer) from Google supports both SWT and Swing and is an extremely high quality product. In fact, Genuitec’s has had a long and fruitful relationship with Instantiations and that relationship has continued even after their acquisition by Google last year. As a result, we have a very high level of confidence in WindowBuilder and its future. Based on that confidence in MyEclipse 9.0 we integrated WindowBuilder into MyEclipse and began providing access to it from our product feature configuration dashboard as “SWT Designer for MyEclipse” and “Swing Designer for MyEclipse”. I’ve attached a screenshot to show you how to easily configure MyEclipse to remove Matisse and transition to SWT and Swing Designer if you choose to.

However, we already have a very large user base for our Matisse designer and would not want to disrupt anyone’s development by removing a tool that so many have come to rely upon. In light of this, our product team has decided that we’ll continue to make our Matisse designer available in MyEclipse for historical continuity so our users can determine when (or if) they’d like to transition to ‘Swing Designer for MyEclipse’.

Finally, I will also note that Swing Designer for MyEclipse already supports the “Matisse format” that any existing designs are saved in so migration should be completely seamless.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

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[TG-GHT]

Dear Scott,

@support-scott wrote:

From the time we launched MyEclipse our goal has simply been to provide our customers the best tools and support at a very reasonable price.

… and you know what: from my point of view this is exactly what you do.

So just let’s see if I’ve got that right:

Genuitec is committed to providing and maintaining the current and future releases of the following three designers:

“SWT Designer for MyEclipse” – formerly part of WindowBuilder
“Swing Designer for MyEclipse” – formerly part of WindowBuilder
“MyEclipse Visual Swing Designer” – aka Matisse / NetBeans GUI Builder

Is that correct?

[Scott Anderson]

tog,

Genuitec is committed to providing and maintaining the current and future releases of the following three designers:

“SWT Designer for MyEclipse” – formerly part of WindowBuilder
“Swing Designer for MyEclipse” – formerly part of WindowBuilder
“MyEclipse Visual Swing Designer” – aka Matisse / NetBeans GUI Builder

Is that correct?

I’d modify that a bit to say that we’re committed to carrying forward our current version of “MyEclipse Visual Swing Designer” but will invest all resources for bug fix or enhancement work into SWT Designer for MyEclipse and Swing Designer for MyEclipse as part of the WindowBuilder project at Eclipse.org. Our goal is for our current user base to slowly migrate to the two newer (Windowbuilder-based) designers going forward and as such that is where we’ll apply our development resources.

[TG-GHT]

Dear Scott,

@support-scott wrote:

Our goal is for our current user base to slowly migrate to the two newer (Windowbuilder-based) designers going forward and as such that is where we’ll apply our development resources.

Thank you very much for that straight forward clarification. This is exactly what I have been wondering: Does long term support of visual desktop UI designers of two different breeds truly make sense?

From my point of view it does not and so I want to congratulate the Genuitec Team on it’s decision. I think taking up the WindowBuilder based designers is a great decision and directing future development focus to them is the logical consequence.

Two features which make me turn towards the WindowBuilder based designers are:

– true bi-directional code editing, i.e. so no source code lockout
– support for powerful none standard Java layout managers such as JGoodies FormLayout and MiGLayout

All in all MyEclipse has once more accomplished to put a smile on my face

     __________
    |          |
    | Thomas G.|
    |          |
--------------------
       I   D   
             
   m     E     e
    y         s 
     e       p     
       c l i 

Nice, isn’t it?

Finally thank you for the great support – you are always blazing fast …

[Scott Anderson]

Thomas,

I have to say, that is some nice ASCII art! Awesome job! 🙂

Glad you’re enjoying the product and that we could clear up our direction for you. You asked a great question as sometimes it can be a little difficult to tell what’s going on from the outside. Around here though, we never fall in love with what we do so when WindowBuilder became available we objectively looked at it and what we had and said “yep, that’s much better” (mainly for the reasons you stated).

If you’re interested in how we make those decisions internally, here’s a blog entry from one of Genuitec’s founders that lays out our thought process and what we value. I thought it was a pretty good read, but YMMV. 😉

Best,

[TG-GHT]

Dear Scott,

@support-scott wrote:

If you’re interested in how we make those decisions internally, here’s a blog entry from one of Genuitec’s founders that lays out our thought process and what we value. I thought it was a pretty good read, but YMMV. 😉

I just went through the blog entry and would say it is even an excellent read. Thank you very much for being so kind pointing me there.

But now that I have read the entry and the fact that YOU have pointed me there makes me wonder whether you are the right person to bother with something which is a bit off topic regarding our WindowBuilder discussion.

In the beginning of 2010 I filed this feature request

https://www.genuitec.com/forums/topic/netbeans-platform-application-support/

with MyEclipse. The request, and now PLEASE remember the “ASCII Thomas G.” showing a BIG smile and do not turn away, deals with NetBeans Platform Development.

Here’s hoping you are still there :-)))

At the time of writing these lines here the request only shows one reply written by myself on Sep 19, 2011. Now I would like to kindly ask you whether you could go through that reply and draw some MyEclipse team member’s attention to it who can confirm or decline the findings I have layed out there.

By the way if look into Geertjan’s blog you will have to scroll all the way down to the last comments there.

Thanks in advance …

[Author]

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