best developing tools for java swing?

[evident]

In college, i used to do java swing interfaces by just coding all of the buttons and components.

is there a GUI way to drag and drop the components you need to get the interface that you desire?

 

[EvilManagedCare]

Netbeans has one (called Project Matisse). I have not used it, but I know Netbeans recently made some improvements to theirs with the release of version 6.5. Eclipse has an interface as well, but I believe it's for SWT, not Swing.

 

[mundane]

I used the Netbeans builder back in college, and it was adequate for quick mockups. However, it usually ended up being easier to do the final version by hand, as the Netbeans layout (Absolute; at the time (?) it wasn't part of the Swing toolkit) typically didn't handle resizing well at all. I don't know if it has changed/improved since.

Since then, I've done it all by hand. You get much more control, and once you understand the layouts and containers it's a fairly quick process.

 

[Onund]

Netbeans 6.5 lets you pick a layout manager from a list. I don't recall all the managers that are included (don't have Netbeans installed on this machine) but there are a few. I never had any problems getting my layouts to behave how I wanted using Netbeans to build the GUI.

 

[Kirby]

Another vote for the Beans. :thumbsup:

 

[postmortemIA]

NetBeans has probably best open-source GUI designer.

It is perfect for Swing.

 

[RaiderJ]

Not sure about swing stuff, but after not using NetBeans for years, I tried the new version and really liked it.

 

[JasonCoder]

Don't know if it's still around and it's definitely not free but IBM's visual age for Java looked super in-depth on the GUI designers. Almost looked like a photoshop for Java GUIs. Might be a WebSphere branded tool by now.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

One more vote for Neatbeans, it's a winner.