Visual swing in Eclipse

Question

Is there any way I can use a visual editor to make swing applications in Eclipse? I'm using Ganymede.

Answer 1

Your options are:

1. WindowBuilder Pro (eclipse.org): "WindowBuilder is a powerful and easy to use bi-directional Java GUI designer", see also WindowBuilder Pro on code.google.com.

2. Visual Swing for Eclipse - an editor that works directly with the .java source files. Notes:

   1. The update url on the front page is wrong (issue 115), should instead be: http://visualswing4eclipse.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/vs4e/
   2. You have to untick "Group items by category" to be able to see the install.
   3. The original announcement of visual swing for eclipse.
   4. Crashed for me when opening a netbeans-generated swing file.
      
      

3. Visual Editor from ehecht.com - someone's own version, last updated 2010-08-29: "prelininary [sic] eclipse 3.6 (helios) version" (direct download: ve_eclipse_36_win32_201008292115.zip) "These files are non official builds. So you use it on [sic] your own risk."

4. Use NetBeans instead

   1. Built-in GUI editor
   2. Uses an xml file as the source for gui design, performing a one-way conversion
   3. Adds its own libraries to your project to support GUI creation.
      
      

5. Jigloo SWT/Swing GUI Builder for Eclipse and WebSphere - Note: Jigloo is free for non-commercial use, but purchase of a Professional License is required for commercial use (after successfully evaluating Jigloo).

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Options no longer viable / available:

• Official "Visual Editor", archived by eclipse: (Archived: June 2011), the matching install instructions at http://wiki.eclipse.org/VE/Update, and the outdated article / tutorial at http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-VE-Custom-Widget/customwidget.html, see also Is eclipse visual editor dead?

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This is a summary of all the other answers to this question as it took me a while to make sense of them.

Answer 2

I use Jigloo a fair bit and it is quite good. Can generate GUIs for both Swing and SWT. Free for non-commercial use, and pretty affordable at $US85 per developer for commercial use. Works fine with 3.4 (Ganymede).

Answer 3

You could try to install echech's version of VE (Visual Editor).
You have here another setup procedure to follow if the first does not work

It should work with with eclipse3.4 (Ganymede).
Or you could download the original version and install it in a eclipse3.2 setup.

It is the only Visual Editor I know knew of which is was free and support Swing.
Note: it is an archived Eclipse project since June 2011.

tehvan mentions a commercial editor: SwingDesigner (now only WBPro for Smalltalk remains)

Answer 4

You may want to give a try at this free Swing visual editor for eclipse. I had not time to give it a run already but that's on my todo list (this editor looks interesting and it is open source).

Answer 5

this is something better than VE

Visual Swing for Eclipse