the corner office

This week's been a bit busy, but I finally got to sit down and tinker with Matisse4MyEclipse for a bit. Just briefly, a bit of Good, Bad and Ugly.

• The ugly: well, jarring is perhaps a fairer statement. While it's integrated into Eclipse, and the Matisse perspective and views work just like a normal Eclipse plug-in, and while there are some SWT-based components, Matisse is a Swing-based application, with lots of Swing-looking menus and controls.

• The bad: not much really, but there are some rough edges. I'm running Java 6 now, and when I open a form I get prompted with a warning that Java 6 isn't fully supported by Matisse4MyEclipse. This happens every time I open a form, which is a bit much. Having said that, I haven't encountered any Java 6 issues yet. Another odd thing is that you can open multiple instances of the same form. I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature.

• The good: this is a helluva lot quicker and easier than hand-coding a UI. I haven't done anything fancy yet, and I haven't taken much time to peek into the internals, but so far, I like it.