Getting Started

GUIDE has very similar requirements to an IDE such as Eclipse or Netbeans. It needs to know the location of your source directories, output directories and your full project classpath. If you open the Sample Project from the Welcome Screen, you can skip this setup and browse some of the functioning demos (from the tutorials), without needing to write a line of code.

The Sample Project

The sample project contains several working demo programs, some of which come from the tutorial. The sample project can be opened from the welcome screen which is loaded when you first start GUIDE or when no projects are open. The sample project is arranged into the following sections:

  1. Tutorials - (watch these being created in the tutorials)

  2. MVC Patterns - (referenced by the MVC Article)

    A look at Martin Folwer and Derek Greer's articles on MVC patterns, with unit-testable example implementations of both the Passive View and Supervising Controller patterns.

  3. Feature Tour

    A collection of small programs demonstrating different features of GUIDE, including menu editing, creating re-usable components, user palettes, image resources and automatic model-to-component generation.
If you're using the sample project rather than creating one from scratch, you may want to skip the next section.

Creating a new project

  1. From the Welcome Screen or File menu, choose "New Project".
  2. You can either create:
    • A new project from scratch
    • A new project from existing sources
    • A new project from an existing IDE's project (currently, only Eclipse is supported)
  3. Unless you're basing your project on external model, you will need to let GUIDE know the paths of your source directories, compiler output directory and your full classpath.

Creating a new design

You can create a new design by right-clicking on one of your source folders and selecting "New Java Form".

New Form Menu

GUIDE brings up a form creation dialog.

Form creation dialog

You will need to specify the name of the class and factory method to generate. GUIDE will show you a preview of the interface it will generate as your enter this information. Click "Create" and you're ready to go.

At this point, may want to visit the tutorials section to see how to create a working user interface