Visual swing in Eclipse

Question

Is there any way I can use a visual editor to make swing applications in Eclipse? I'm using Ganymede.

Answer 1

Your options are:

1. WindowBuilder Pro (eclipse.org): "WindowBuilder is a powerful and easy to use bi-directional Java GUI designer", see also WindowBuilder Pro on code.google.com.

2. Visual Swing for Eclipse - an editor that works directly with the .java source files. Notes:

   1. The update url on the front page is wrong (issue 115), should instead be: http://visualswing4eclipse.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/vs4e/
   2. You have to untick "Group items by category" to be able to see the install.
   3. The original announcement of visual swing for eclipse.
   4. Crashed for me when opening a netbeans-generated swing file.
      
      

3. Visual Editor from ehecht.com - someone's own version, last updated 2010-08-29: "prelininary [sic] eclipse 3.6 (helios) version" (direct download: ve_eclipse_36_win32_201008292115.zip) "These files are non official builds. So you use it on [sic] your own risk."

4. Use NetBeans instead

   1. Built-in GUI editor
   2. Uses an xml file as the source for gui design, performing a one-way conversion
   3. Adds its own libraries to your project to support GUI creation.
      
      

5. Jigloo SWT/Swing GUI Builder for Eclipse and WebSphere - Note: Jigloo is free for non-commercial use, but purchase of a Professional License is required for commercial use (after successfully evaluating Jigloo).

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Options no longer viable / available:

• Official "Visual Editor", archived by eclipse: (Archived: June 2011), the matching install instructions at http://wiki.eclipse.org/VE/Update, and the outdated article / tutorial at http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-VE-Custom-Widget/customwidget.html, see also Is eclipse visual editor dead?

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This is a summary of all the other answers to this question as it took me a while to make sense of them.

Answer 2

I use Jigloo a fair bit and it is quite good. Can generate GUIs for both Swing and SWT. Free for non-commercial use, and pretty affordable at $US85 per developer for commercial use. Works fine with 3.4 (Ganymede).