Gui designer for java

Question

i need a free tool like Jform designer or free plug-in for intelliJ idea to make gui form easier! az a mather o fact gui design in intelliJ idea is not good enough for me!i can't use it easy and i do'nt want to writing code for its weakness or use netbeans!i need solution for it!?? thanks very very much

Answer 1

Netbeans has one, it's called Matisse .

Eclipse has a number of them, the only one I'm remotely familiar with is Window Builder .

Answer 2

I recommend you to use NetBeans IDE:

http://netbeans.org/downloads/

http://netbeans.org/kb/docs/java/quickstart-gui.html

Answer 3

Echoing what everyone else has said about Netbeans. It has been wonderful to me for wiring up forms, but after that hand coding has been the way I go thereafter. I typically structure my classes as follows:

public class MyPanel extends javax.swing.JPanel
{
    public MyPanel(...)
    {
       initComponents();
       build();
       initListeners();
    }
 }

where initComponents() is the autogenerated layout from NetBeans. Then I add any additional components in my build() which I want to either hand code or set default params that I didn't want to do in the form designer, and then add my listeners in another hand coded method, initListeners(). That way even I'm not stuck in Netbeans, when I move away from it for further development (which I do in Eclipse). The downside is that I have two IDEs.

Answer 4

Google recently donated the former proprietary GUI designer WindowBuilder to the Eclipse foundation. It's a great tool, check it out: http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/javadevtools/wbpro/

Some of its features include:

• Bi-directional Code Generation - read and write almost any format and reverse-engineer most hand-written code
• Internationalization (i18n) / Localization - externalize component strings, create and manage resource bundles.
• Custom Composites & Panels - create custom, reusable components.
• Factories - create custom factory classes and methods.
• Visual Inheritance - create visual component hierarchies.
• Event Handling - add event handlers to your components.
• Menu Editing - visually create and edit menubars, menu items and popup menus.
• Morphing - convert one component type into another.