Question

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

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Solution

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

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

OTHER TIPS

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.

Netbeans comes with a nice GUI builder, look here: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/tools/nb_guibuilder/

Netbeans is the best tool till date!

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!

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.

I suggest you using JBuilder ....

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.

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

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

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/

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