Tutorials Overview


Please go through these walk-through Tutorials. They are the best way to familiarize yourself with the JDesignerPro Application Builder and Deployment functions. You should also read the section above, Understanding The JDesignerPro System. It is an important foundation for using JDesignerPro to maximum benefit.

BulletProof also offers downloadable multimedia tutorials that cover numerous parts of JDesignerPro and give examples of how to complete typical tasks with JDesignerPro. Visit www.bulletproof.com to see the list of multimedia tutorials available.

The JDesignerPro Application Builder uses a unique and powerful engine developed by BulletProof. JDesignerPro uses a relational Layout Manager to help you position screen elements. This relational positioning mechanism gives you a great advantage in managing the layout of your form. The Java AWT is difficult to work with, so by using JDesignerPro you are leveraging the knowledge BulletProof has in Java layout design. In order to keep your forms WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) on all platforms, JDesignerPro uses Java’s Layout Management methods and JavaBeans in a visual system. This ensures that all Java virtual machines, like those found in browsers, on all platforms will display the form properly.

The screens you build with JDesignerPro are totally resizable. Stretch or shrink the screen to any size and the form will modify itself to fit the area. These benefits are not gained when using development environments like Symantec Cafe™, Visual J++™, Apptivity™, NetDynamics™, JBuilder™ and others, which have not employed the true Java layout management in their environments.

There are numerous benefits gained by using JDesignerPro that are not obvious, but are critical. One is the dynamic placement of vertical and horizontal scroll bars, when necessary, if the screen is stretched at run time. Another is the ability to tab between fields on a form. Both tabbing forward through fields and Shift-tabbing to go backwards are automatically built-in to your finished screens. One large advantage is that when you make a change to the GUI layout JDesignerPro will modify all the code necessary for you including Interactions. Again, this is not done by tools like Cafe. There are myriad other similar small but important differences you’ll notice as you learn this system.

There are many other features this section does not cover that are explained in the System Maintenance area of the manual.