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What is the best and powerful tool for building swing interface? What tool do you use for swing? Why?

Jens Schauder
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Max
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    I used to use gui builders a few years ago, but only for fun or protoyping. They was very limited - changing generated code causes that designer didn't work anymore, and generated code was very excessive. What I miss in answers is some detailed information about pros and cons of todays these tools and why to use them. – cetnar Jan 04 '10 at 14:45
  • Thx. Nice opinion. I've read more about this there http://stackoverflow.com/questions/623692/handcode-gui-or-use-gui-designer-tool – Max Jan 04 '10 at 14:58

12 Answers12

10

NetBeans Matisse (comes bundled with NetBeans) is good and powerful.

This eclipse plugin seems fresh as well, but I haven't tried it.

Bozho
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    Uhaaa I strongly disagree about your opinion on Matisse. – zedoo Jan 04 '10 at 13:58
  • Though I agree with the fact that NetBeans is good at GUI building, I'm a bit uncertain on the future of Sun NetBeans now Sun has been taken over by Oracle, which has it's own Java IDE. – extraneon Jan 04 '10 at 14:04
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    @zedoo - I've used it in a big project and found no major drawbacks. explain exactly about your experience? @extraneon - That is too distant and too unrelated to whether the tools works good or not. Even if Oracles decides tomorrow that it stops developing everying Sun's, including Java, the tool will still be a good one. – Bozho Jan 04 '10 at 14:33
  • @Bozho - the major drawback of Matisse is that it relies on proprietary metadata, and locked regions. Once you decide to use it, you're bound to it. – zedoo Jan 04 '10 at 19:46
  • that's a fair point, but if a project starts using one technology / tool, and at half the time decides to switch, there is something wrong with the developers, not the technology / tool – Bozho Jan 04 '10 at 22:10
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Eclipse is my IDE of choice. You can download Eclipse Visual Editor Project(VEP) from here. take a look at this tutorial.

The Eclipse Visual Editor project is a vendor-neutral, open development platform supplying frameworks for creating GUI builders, and exemplary, extensible tool implementations for Swing/JFC and SWT/RCP.

if you want some compression between Eclipse's VEP and NetBeans' Matisse, take a look at this and this.

Michel Gokan Khan
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  • I may have missed something but the comparison links are almost exclusively about swt vs. swing and not about gui builders (VEP can generate swing code). A short summary of both: first swt is good, VEP is no contest for Matisse, second swt sucks --> VEP sucks?? – josefx Jan 08 '10 at 12:01
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Netbeans comes with a nice GUI builder, look here: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/tools/nb_guibuilder/

mavroprovato
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3

Netbeans is the best tool till date!

Sandeep
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The Netbeans builder can be quite nice, but it does build a lot of code for some simple tasks. So over time I have gone back to coding by hand, it can save you a lot of time in the long run!

Kyle
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  • Code generation has always had that problem. But I don't think writing it manually will save time - I've done a big project with Matisse and it was easy and smooth. – Bozho Jan 04 '10 at 11:09
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Look at these:

http://www.instantiations.com/windowbuilder/

zedoo
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  • WindowBuilder is now free and part of Google Java Developers Tools, see http://code.google.com/javadevtools/ – Roalt Nov 11 '10 at 07:24
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I have written a Qt-style wrapper around GridBagLayout and I handcode my GUIs using it.

Visual GUI builders certainly provide more flexibility but that comes at the cost of reduced readability of the code. However I do use NetBeans Matisse when I have some quick and dirty job at hand. ;)

Anyway...

If you are interested in handcoding GUIs at all, then you might also like to have a look at MigLayout. I have never tried it though.

missingfaktor
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I suggest you using JBuilder ....

mitron
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JFormDesigner is a nice visual designer. It supports lots of open source and built-in swing Layout, it has a plugin support for Eclipse,IntelliJ and also can be used external designer.I have used it as an IntelliJ plugin in a multi-year big swing project with no problem.

caltuntas
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I prefer coding by hand with GridBagLayout, but if I had to use a GUI-Builder I would use NetBeans.

deamon
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After using NetBeans and the Eclipse plugin, I'd go with NetBeans.

clartaq
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Abeille Forms is pretty good. It's based on JGoodies FormLayout. With Abeille you can layout your components visuals and access and/or replace the component with a richer component at runtime.

https://abeille.dev.java.net/

Scott
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