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I am about to build a UI in Java and I am trying to determine what I should use. I definitely don't want to use vanilla swing.

The one caveat is that it has to be added inside of an existing swing application. I am looking at JavaFX and Groovy Swing Builder. For the former it looks like there is fairly poor support for embedding into swing.

Anyone have another other suggestions?

ghempton
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    If the question is about declarative UI builders, then it's almost a duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/761237/suggestions-for-declarative-gui-programming-in-java . It's hard to tell right now, though. – Michael Myers May 09 '09 at 04:58
  • What's the "vanilla" thing I've been hearing everywhere ?? – OscarRyz May 09 '09 at 22:57
  • @OscarRyz Not sure about vanilla, but chocolate Swing is animated http://i996.photobucket.com/albums/af88/taranaingel/Places/swstpgch.png – David J. Liszewski Nov 28 '11 at 17:01
  • have you thought about building your backend with java but using another language for interface? I find most java interfaces quite heavy. – Fawix Oct 20 '13 at 13:32

4 Answers4

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The groovy guys are working on Griffon: http://groovy.codehaus.org/Griffon.

I believe it is supposed to model a console type GUI like a web UI.

Another possible answer is JavaFX. Here's a link to their hello world app: http://javafx.com/docs/gettingstarted/javafx/create-first-javafx-app.jsp

bluish
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Nathan Feger
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  • +1 for Griffon. Not so sure about JavaFX though, it doesn't seem to have gained much traction despite the marketing effort that was ploughed into it – Dónal Nov 28 '11 at 17:02
  • Griffon sports a JavaFX plugin that works with the current JavaFX 2.0. See https://github.com/deanriverson/griffon-javafx-plugin – Andres Almiray Dec 03 '11 at 19:48
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Have you considered using NetBeans?

http://www.netbeans.org/features/java/swing.html

alphazero
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  • Why got this downvoted? Building swing uis with Netbeans is really easy as it uses a graphical editor. – nxadm May 09 '09 at 09:14
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I'm not quite sure what you're looking for, but SwingX might fit the bill.

Contains extensions to the Swing GUI toolkit, including new and enhanced components that provide functionality commonly required by rich client applications. Highlights include:

  • Sorting, filtering, highlighting for tables, trees, and lists
  • Find/search
  • Auto-completion
  • Login/authentication framework
  • TreeTable component
  • Collapsible panel component
  • Date picker component
  • Tip-of-the-Day component

(SwingLabs seems to be down at the moment, though.)

Edit: On second reading, I guess you were actually talking about declarative UI builders? In that case, I'll refer you to another answer of mine in which I recommended javabuilders, a YAML-based Swing UI builder.

Community
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Michael Myers
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I've used JIDE in the past. It's docking framework is pretty awesome.

dogbane
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