Swing Application Designing

Hi everbody,

I am just shifted to swing from vb.net for a client project. My question is, which IDE I must prefer so that I can easily design interfaces(viz. Windows, widgets etc), just I was created in vb.net environment. Can I do this rather than writing the whole stuff(Creating layouts,panels etc)

Thanks.

I personal think the JBuilder is a good tool to design AWT/Swing UI. Do you think so?

Thanks Adone ,
I will definitely look for JBuilder. Actually the deadline of project is very small, and I dont want myself to engage in creating panels (using code), deciding the alignment etc. I just want by using few mouse clicks, everything should get designed(quite similar to vb.net app designing).

Thanks for everything, and coming with more.

Building a GUI app in Swing is not trivial and can be a real pain depending on how you do it.

I use NetBeans to build our GUI components which I then move into IntelliJ.

NetBeans has a really nice LayoutManager called FreeLayout, which allows you to move your components into place wherever you like. It's a lightning fast way to build GUI components, but it comes with some negative side effect which are, you need to supply the correct jar-file with your project + the actual genererated code can be difficult to understand + you actually depend on NetBeans to make adjustments (if you don't know how the code works).

I usually use the FreeLayout in NetBeans to build a prototype of the GUI, when that prototype is approved from a Layout perspective I then use GridBagLayout to build the actual GUI. With GridBagLayout I have "total" control later to adjust the code by hand and I am not depending on any particular GUI tool.

So, I can recommend using NetBeans, you can use that as a complete development tool if you want to, and it's free.

www.netbeans.org