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I'm looking for a good GUI designer for swing in eclipse. My preference is for a free/open-source plugin.

jumar
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12 Answers12

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Window Builder Pro is a great GUI Designer for eclipse and is now offered for free by google.

Andrew Marshall
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jumar
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    Windows Builder download: http://www.eclipse.org/windowbuilder/download.php – Martin Konicek Jul 17 '11 at 22:45
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    Update site for Eclipse Indigo release: http://download.eclipse.org/windowbuilder/WB/release/R201106211200/3.7/ – Kris Aug 09 '11 at 06:51
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    Window Builder Pro is fantastic. Be sure to go into Window->Preferences, then WindowBuilder, to configure how variables are set up, event handlers, etc. I prefer to configure my variables to always be fields, and my event handlers to be "implement listener interface in parent class". Feels more like Visual Basic when I do that. – Richard Dec 27 '11 at 19:41
  • It's a little bit slow compared to NetBeans but i like the fact of having editor that doesn't change my code so much or hinders editing as NetBeans does. – Puterdo Borato May 07 '12 at 19:53
54

Here is a quite good but old comparison http://wiki.computerwoche.de/doku.php/programmierung/gui-builder_fuer_eclipse Window Builder Pro is now free at Google Web Toolkit

Markus
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Look at my plugin for developing swing application. It is as easy as that of netbeans': http://code.google.com/p/visualswing4eclipse/

7

'Jigloo' is a very cool GUI designer. It is not free for commercial use however. It auto-generates code and allows for custom editing of the code it creates.

http://www.cloudgarden.com/jigloo/

jjnguy
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6

Another good GUI designer for Eclipse is Window Builder Pro. Like Jigloo, it's not free for commercial use.

It allows you to design user interfaces for Swing, SWT and even the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

David Crow
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visualswing4eclipse looks good but the eclipse update URL didn't work for me (I raised ticket 137)

I was only able to install a previous version. Here's a url in case anyone wants it: http://visualswing4eclipse.googlecode.com/svn-history/r858/trunk/org.dyno.visual.swing.site/site.xml

The plugin actually looks very good.

matt burns
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  • The project seems abandoned. I've tested it on Eclipse 3.6, and it was very unstable. Only five, almost trivial commits, in the past 3 years. https://code.google.com/p/visualswing4eclipse/source/list – Awi Jun 28 '12 at 20:55
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Visual Editor is a good choice.

It generates very clean code, with no "layout" files beside of your sourcen using a simple but convenient pattern. It's very easy to patch the generated code and directly see the result. There are some stability problems (some times, the preview window does not refresh anymore...), but nothing that a "clean Project" can't fix...

Laurent K
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3

Old question, but have you checked out JFormDesigner?

HiQ CJ
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GWT Designer is very good and allows for rapid development of GWT websites. (http://www.instantiations.com/gwtdesigner/)

Autobyte
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well check out the eclipse distro easyeclipse at EasyEclipse. it has Visual editor project already added as a plugin, so no hassles of eclipse version compatibility.Plus the eclipse help section has a tutorial on VE.

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It's not free or open source. But you can give Intellij Idea's SWING GUI designer a try.

Pablo Santa Cruz
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I use GWTDesigner http://www.instantiations.com/gwtdesigner/ which is not free but works well. Best of all, their customer support is top notch - very responsive.

Steve Buikhuizen
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