NetBeans Gui Builder on existing code

Question

I use Eclipse from time to time to maintain some java code for my employer and to hack locally some OSS to my needs.

While I did not upgraded my Eclipse distro since the 3.5 release, I was recently amazed by the WindowBuilder feature when I upgraded to 3.7. WindowBuilder has the interesting possibility to parse some existing code and render the corresponding GUI. When it is not automagical, I can try to force the rendering by a right-click / open with / WindowBuilder editor .

I also recently decided to test the NetBeans IDE (latest release available at this time : 7.0.1) that I found visually appealing and that I guess it should be less bloated than my Eclipse + a bunch of plugins (NSIS integration + mylyn + CDT + ...) for just some java development stricto sensu .

My problem is that for some code (in my test case, it is on the jomic project) NetBeans GUI Builder makes no rendering of a (quite simple) Jframe derived class, and I did not found if / how to tell it to try. The same class can be rendered by WindowBuilder if I open with / WindowBuilder editor .

Is there a trick that I can use to render the GUI code ? Thanks for helping a NetBeans rookie :)

Answer 1

The GUI Builder only works on code that the GUI Builder made.

NetBeans form editor is not able to regenerate a missing .form file for GUI classes, or to generate a .form file for GUI classes not originally created in NetBeans .

However, there are some external tools trying to address this problem, eg FormGenerator . Check contrib.netbeans.org for newest version. Source