interface design

[jason.s.turner]

Does anyone know of a nice GUI interface designer for doing Java
applets and/or applications that's sort of similar to what MS Visual
Studio has for "drawing" GUI apps? I don't care if it's free or
commercial and I don't care if easy interface design is the only
functionality.

Thanks a lot,

Jason

 

[jyzhang]

So Eclipse has a plugin, called VE (Visual Editor) that does a decent
job. I started using it before it was 1.0 and it was kinda buggy but
it has since gotten much better. It can do both Swing and SWT and
would be my first choice.

An alternative is IntelliJ IDEA by JetBrains. This is a full featured
IDE, but not free.

My last choice is NetBeans (or whatever it's called these days). This
is an open source IDE made by Sun. It has an integrated GUI designer,
but I like it much less (slow). Maybe Sun has improved it over past
year, but I haven't tried it again...

James

 

[Thomas Weidenfeller]

Does anyone know of a nice GUI interface designer for doing Java
applets and/or applications

Matisse, nowadays part of the free NetBeans IDE http://www.netbeans.org

A Flash-Demo is at
http://www.netbeans.org/files/documents/4/475/matisse.html

As a general remark: Whatever you do or use, learn the layout managers.
Designing functional Java GUIs is not just about "painting" some random
stuff in a window. Not using layout managers or not using them properly
is a great way to write junk Java GUIs which easily break.

/Thomas