For ages I have been designing gui’s by hand, placing components on a pre-thought grid. But as you know this is a time consuming task:). Are there editors/ide’s that intregate GUI design, much like visual basic does. I know intellij idea has one, but this IDE is not Free:(.
So basically what i’m looking for is a (free)visual GUI designer, preferrable intregated in Eclipse.
Cheers
Paul
Short answer is virtually all of them have GUI builders.
Eclipse, Netbeans, etc…
Havign said that don’t ask me to rate them because I dont sue em. I can write Swing code by hand faster and easier then using any of these editors.
Me too. The big disappointment I found with Mattisse is that once again it is a a royal pain in the butt to get your UI initialized with the data you want and to change it at runtime. You can’t edit the initialization code directly and have to put the code for each component into some silly dialog box in the GUI editor.
That and the fact that they invented yet another layoutmanager while they still don’t support Spring layout (remember, it is the layout manger DESIGNED FOR LAYOUT TOOLS)
Once you’ve done it a few times it is simply faster to get something usable by coding it by hand. Which is sad if you ask me. It should be faster to whip up something that looks right with a tool like Matisse and then finish it off by hand. But they’ve gone and made that bloody difficult to do.