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GUI Creation With IDEs

 
Greenhorn
Posts: 9
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Hi folks,

I have a new question. It came up while I was just happy and all about my new discovery: Eclipse an java IDE that obeys me and not the contrary like some other IDEs *cof*netbeans*cof*.

Well like I was saying, I was just happy and enjoying my new IDE and all its code-wizards and widgets. At one moment I found that I needed to make an GUI for a program. Thats when I discovered that I hadn't any eclipse plugins to create swing/awt applications. Well, of course I could just hard-code all the forms, buttons and so on, but my swing was a bit rusty. So I decided to look for alternate ways of creating visual applications, and for help from experienced users.

I looked for help at two places,

The first was the eclipse newcomer newsportal, the almost unanimous advice was to use VE(Visual Editor) that is still under development before getting stable for both europa and ganymede releases(the most recent ones). Given my past(painful) experience with beta IDEs I'v decided to use some caution.

So I looked for another place for help, my college newsgroup.

The ideas there where the most interesting ones, some of my colleges said that they weren't using any visual assisted development tools(to create GUIs), just hard coding all the interfaces. They said that "in many situations they needed to hard-code many basic features, on their GUI, like resizable forms, rearrangement of the widgets, storing previous locations and sizes of the windows.

So my question is, what is your opinion its better to just to create IDEs programatically, or maybe use visual editors? Or a third option(or a fourth)?

Sorry if this got too big(or boring).
 
Ranch Hand
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I have been doing some GUI development lately based on Eclipse RCP and I have been using only handcoded UI design.

I had used VB earlier, which offers a great UI designer to create the UI Widgets but I feel with the layouts the Eclipse offers (like GridLayout, FormLayout) you hardly have to handle nitty-gritty details related to aligning/resigning the widgets by yourself.

So I have been happy so far.
 
Java Cowboy
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The Matisse GUI builder in NetBeans is very good. But you don't like NetBeans...

The Visual Editor in Eclipse isn't new, but for some reason not many people are working on it, and so it has fallen behind.

There is WindowBuilder Pro for Eclipse (it's not free).
 
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