Recently for my CS414 Course at Colorado State one of my assignments required me to develop an application in Swing. Lets face it, Swing Sucks. It is simply a fact of life. The primary reason for Swing being so terrible, in my opinion, is because it is so difficult to actually build the UI and get it to look like what you want it to look like. Manually positioning the elements and fighting with layout managers is all that comes to mind when I think about developing an application with Swing.

While searching around on the Internet however I stumbled across WindowBuilder Pro from Google. It is a WYSIWYG Editor for Eclipse that allows you to quickly and easily build entire Swing UI's as well as individual Swing components. Unlike most other tools I have used, the code that this one generates is actually readable and makes sense. It is also smart enough to allow you to re-factor the code after its generated, and then still allow you to visually edit the layout of the components. Most other tools just die when you do this.

In short, If you need to build a Swing, GWT, or SWT User Interface, You should really take a look at WindowBuilder Pro.

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Published

25 September 2012

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