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Why I’m going to avoid Matisse.

Working on my VocRecaptor project using NetBeans IDE I decided to try the Matisse project for GUI developing. I was glad to avoid all these problems and tricks which developers are usually faced with swing layouts. It was really easy and handy to build a required set of panels and GUI elements. As result I got two files for each panel - java class (which I was supposed to edit only from IDEs GUI-builder) and form file containing all layouts and information how all elements are arranged inside the form. Using GUI-builder I set element preperties like names and captions. In my application I use an i18n and it was quite easy to force  labels and buttons to load it’s captions from application resource bundle where all the strings are stored. It really took me no more than a couple of hours to build GUI. But then broblems began. Several times something went wrong inside the form file and visual components lost their positions and layouts. I had to layout them again. Then, migrating from IDE version 5.5 to 6.0 I’ve experienced the problem with resource bundles. As I mentioned before developers are not supposed to edit some parts of java-code inside the panel class because this code is generated automatically by IDE. So, my IDE spoiled lines of code where text elements load their captions from the bundle. At the same time the pattern specified in element’s text property was correct. I tried to change the pattern but all was useless and I still had a compilation error. I decided that it might be consequences of migration form NetBeans 5.5 to 6.0 and from Windows to Linux (but really, I cannot see here the problem) and mended source code using external text editor. It took about two hours and several grammes of nerve cells I almost forget about these problem, even more so I’ve finished all GUI work for that time. But today I needed to slightly change one panel - add a button with internationalized caption. And what I got? Error again:

And from the inside it looked very familiar:

I had to edit more than 10 places inside the code using an external editor to get rid of these stuff. And I’m not going to do it again. What I’ll do next - I’ll rewrite all my GUI to get rid of Matisse. Moreover, now I’m working with NetBeans but what if I’ll need to use Eclipse - will Matisse work there? Don’t wanna try. Such GUI builder can save you time when you need to quickly build user interface, but on a long run there is no any advantages, but problems might be.