I’ve been doing web development / design for about five years now, and I was about to go onto Dreamweaver as I thought it would make it so much easier to make websites. Later on I heard that it is discouraged to use WYSIWYG editors to build websites as it add “unnecessary code” to your project. I then heard that if you try to write scripts in Dreamweaver, it messes it up.
Now I am trying to get into software development. I’ve downloaded Netbeans to play around in Java, and it offers some thing like .NET how I can just drag controls onto my GUI. The only programming I actually do is making the buttons do stuff. I don’t see myself learning very much Java is I stick to this, but I don’t see myself learning it anyway…
I know that I shouldn’t be using this to learn, however I would like an opinion from somebody who has experience in software development.
Is using a formbuilder to build GUIs as bad, or worse, than using a WYSIWYG editor to build websites? Is this a good way to learn how to code software?
Form builders and WYSIWYSG’s have their place. I think you’ll find that many developers don’t use them because most developers are control freaks. It also depends on the specific one your using and your target environment/language. It’s not bad to use a form builder, but IMO you should learn how to create the UI elements programmatically before using one so you understand the properties and methods for the different controls. Also, the form builder is only useful to lay your UI out. The majority of the work will be the layers that cater to the UI logic.
There’s nothing wrong with using them, but you’ll likely need to access properties or methods of your controls in code to facilitate the presentation logic, so you’ll still need to learn the controls you use.
Hope that helps.