Netbeans: Is it possible to convert a hand-coded GUI into one understood by Matisse?

Question

I'm starting development on an existing open source project that used a hand-coded GUI. Is it possible to somehow import this into Matisse, so that I can edit this project's GUI in Matisse? Or do I basically have to rebuild it from scratch in Matisse?

Cheers,
red.october

Answer 1

I think this is very hard to do ( dare I say impossible? ). There are so many style of coding, that I think it would be far faster to redesign everything using Matisse, than to get some half-decent code automatically generated.

If you designed your code somewhat efficiently, you should be able to make the transition to Matisse pretty painless.

Answer 2

I am not aware of a conversion. You could create smaller handcoded components (which has to be a bean) and add them to the GUI palette to create a new Matisse-based GUI.

For more info look here

Answer 3

you can try the eclipse WindowBuilder tool, it works similarly to matisse, and reads real java code instead of form files..