GUI development advice

I'm currently developing a data acquisition, processing, and visiualization tool using GUIDE, but the things I want (need) to do are growing increasingly complex. The project statred out as a simple little tool and it is now turning into a full blown application. Is Matlab and/or GUIDE a good choice for building standalone applications? Would using a combination of say Java and Matlab be better? Is it possible to build an applications framework and "bookkeeping" functionality in Java and then use Matlab for numerical work? I would also like to make something that is visually appealing.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

GUIDE is fairly primitive, although you can add third party ActiveX COM objects to spice up your GUI with snazzy widgets. If you want a fancy, pretty, complicated user interface you'll have to look elsewhere as GUIDE is somewhat basic. They've been telling me for about 3-4 years now that a major overhaul of GUIDE is underway - I'm not holding my breath for it. You can use Java or Microsoft Visual Studio to design beautiful interfaces and then pass the necessary parameters to your MATLAB engine that runs in the background. There are toolboxes for that, such as NE Builder. Look under the "Application Deployment" section of this web page: http://www.mathworks.com/products/

[tlawren]

Are there no methods to combine Matlab and Java or C++ that are free? All of the Builders cost more than 4k, so that is out of the question. I'm not going to distribute my work, so spending that much money isn't worth it. I just want to a fancy, complex GUI for personal use, and it appears that I've stretched GUIDE as far it can go.

[Image Analyst]

Why aren't you able to add in a third party control? You should be able to find some for free or at low cost. There's an icon for placing them in GUIDE. Just click the icon, pick the OCX (or whatever) of the widget you want, and place it on your figure. Have you tried that?

[tlawren]

I do have the ability to add Active X controls in GUIDE on Windows, but not in Linux. The button you are speaking about is not there on my Linux machines.

Answer 2

[tlawren]

Something like the following may be what I'm looking for...

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/15580-using-java-swing-components-in-matlab

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~whitehouse/matlab/JavaMatlab.html

Answer 3

[Yair Altman]

http://UndocumentedMatlab.com is full of examples of how you can really spice up your Matlab GUI using Java, which is free and built-in. And it is even relatively simple so you will have fun doing it.