What is the preferred visual editor Eclipse plugin for Swing apps in 2011?

Question

I know this question has been asked before, but those answers are over 2 years old in many cases.

I've heard that the Eclipse Visual Editor project has been dormant for a while, the VisualSwing4Eclipse update site doesn't appear to contain anything (perhaps it doesn't support Helios?). There is also Jigloo, but its website looks rather amateurish and does not inspire confidence.

My preference is either a free tool, or free for non-commercial use.

Answer 1

NetBeans Matisse . Since you ask about Eclise - on a GUI project that I was working on, we were using NetBeans to just 'draw' the UI, and then switched to eclipse to write the code.

Answer 2

Google has recently given Windowbuilder pro to Eclipse. It's free and you can build swing, SWT and GWT screens. It's not totally mature but really worth trying. http://code.google.com/javadevtools/download-wbpro.html

Answer 3

In general, I would advise against using a UI designer for Swing, because most often the generated code is just unreadable, hence unmaintainable.

In addition, some designers enforce your whole team to use one IDE, not necessarily their favourite one, hence potentially reudcing their productivity.

For UI design with Swing, I much prefer using LayoutManager that makes it easy to code your UI directly (I don't talk about GridBagLayout of course), such as:

• DesignGridLayout
• MigLayout
• there are probably others...

You may want to take a look at this link , where several LayoutManager s are compared, although it is a bit old, it is still worthy of interest. There, you have a broad view of existing Swing LayoutManagers and you can see the code needed, with each, to produce the same UI.