I was always big fan of Visual Basic and event-driven programming. Inspite of its limitations no one can deny the fact that it makes Powerful GUI development a lot easier.
An year ago i was working on Java and slighty touched Swing. After knowing the flexiblity and customizations that JAVA/Swing provided, i always wondered and actually awaited to see a good GUI builder for developing swing applications. After much research and anticipation came along one of the best GUI builders for Java. It ws Netbeans' Matisse GUI Builder from version 5.0. With it came along a new layout "Free Design" which i much similar to VB's editor but with much more features.
Some features include:
Navigator (on the left) -> which tells you which component is in which panel and helps to easily move components without disturbing the look of the User Interface.
Palette (on the right) -> thats lists all te available components that are drag-and-drop enabled.
Form -> The actual form also suggests where to put a particular control, aligns components etc.
"When a GridBag Layout is selected a special option "Customize this layout" will appear. This is really kool.. It lets you do cell padding, cell spacing (for the Grid) to create production quality GUI.
Read full review at
codewatch. Here you can also download a fully functional and working example of the same with screenshots
Happy Programming !!!
