Greetings.

My question is about a feature in Forte for Java 4 (CE) and should not
be very difficult for someone with some experience with creating GUIs
with Forte. When you design a somewhat complex GUI, you
naturally want to split it up into managable parts. For example, you
might create a JFrame with a JTabbedPane, and then create separate
subclasses of JPanel for all the panels which will become tabs. After
designing all the JPanels, you want to add them to the tabbed pane.
Usually, that's no problem, just call tabbedPane.add(aPanel) or so
until they are all there. However, I have found no way to do that in
Forte without resorting to creating code for it manually, which sort
of misses the point of using a GUI-designer in the first place. I have
read every tutorial and manual I could get my hands on at Sun and
otherwise, but none adresses this (I think?) very common situation.
They all just keep adding components in the same form until the GUI
looks like they want, but the code is a horrendous, unmanagable mess
with dozens or hundreds of components in the same class. I have seen
some hint that Javabeans might be the solution, but my attempts have
failed miserably. Forte won´t even touch my "beans" since they need to
touch things all over the place, which javabeans seemingly aren't
supposed to do. But I might have missed something.

I need a page or tutorial or anything which explains how you are
supposed to (or why you can't and shouldn't) use Forte in this
situation.

Hello Nps,

I did a quick search and was not able to find an explanation on line
that would help you. I will make a brief comment based on my
experience building GUI's that may be relevant.

Each element of a GUI usually takes about a page of code to implement.

I have built user interfaces over the last 20 years or so and this
seems to have been invariant across terminals, analog displays, as
well as more modern display systems. The new ones generally look a lot
better, but it still takes a page of code to glue it all together and
do what you want.

If this is not the kind of result you are getting, I'd like to know so
I can adjust my estimates the next time I have to do a Java project.
If it is the result you are getting, I don't have any good cures - I
haven't seen one in a 20 year period and would be surprised to see one
today.
  --Maniac