Java Programming: Swing Interfaces

Java Programming: Swing Interfaces

In my last post, Java programming: Profiling your code, I've suggested a closed source, commercial tool. I'm not very fond of such tools but JProfiler really is a great tool that deserve some attention, today I'll be talking about another tool that like JProfiler is very useful.

Everyone who already had to program Desktop Interfaces using swing probably knows it's not the easiest not simplest task to perform. I really would say that to code such interfaces is really painful is they have to be done by the developer without having the aid of a GUI developing interface
Netbeans, a well known Java IDE, comes with a simple interface design plugin which reliefs the developer's effort of creating GUIs, though there is an application which in my opinion is much better. By saying better I mean a tool that makes the process of creating a swing interface not only easy and simple but also fast.
The tool in question is called JformDesigner a commercial tool developed by a german company called FormDev Software GmbH.

When I first found JFormDesigner about an year ago I was amazed with all it's features. This was still version 2, but on the past November version 3 was released filled with new goodies, including a Eclipse Plugin instead of the standalone application itself.

You can browse their feature page to have a better picture but for me the best features definitely are:

• A true WYSIWYG editor
• Eclipse Integration
  Since I'm very fond of Eclipse IDE
• Standalone application
  Because I know that not everyone if fond of Eclipse, so even if there isn't the plugin for a certain IDE there's always a the standalone application.
• The java code generated is clean - understand as it's still human readable.
  This means that learning swing from it, doing strange hacks (don't really know why someone who want to hack the generated code but it's possible) or debugging might not be that difficult.

For me the only side kick is that JFormDesigner is a commercial tool and licensing goes from 65 euros to 155 euros depending on its type (still, less expensive then the licenses in the jprofiler).

Before putting aside this tool - since it's commercial - I recommend the visualization of the demonstration videos(flash videos) to realise it's power. As an alternative the 20-day free evaluation licensing can always be used to give it a try.

Maybe one day we'll get such a good tool in the open source community.

I've presented the two closed source and commercial tools that I find very useful and use from time to time. From now on I won't be presenting any other tools in such situation so, to all the open source defenders (I myself am a open source defender but not extremist) reading this blog: don't worry...I'm not crossing to the dark side!