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Java GUI Builders?

 
Greenhorn
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I have been doing Java for about six months and I have been using text pad. My question is are their any tools out there that allow you to drag and drop when creating GUIS with swing and AWT. I am working on a project and I really would like to speed things up. Thanks.
 
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There are many tools that provide visual GUI building, such as JBuilder, Visual Cafe, etc. I never liked using these tools because they suck and you'll learn much more if you do it yourself. Also, building swing applications are easy and fast once you get he hang of it.
SAF
 
author
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Since this is a perfect topic for the "IDE's and Other tools" forum, I'm going to move it there.
Sean
 
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JBuilder is far superior to Visual Cafe. To get something done while using Cafe is an achievement because it tries to hinder you every step of the way. By contrast, I never had any major problems with JBuilder. It's not perfect though.
Overallm I agree with Safrole. Get to know the swing classes and how to use them.
 
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I personally use Forte which makes building GUI's very easy. The bonus is that Forte is a free download from Sun.com
 
Greenhorn
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When I started in 1999 with Java I was fascinated about the feature Layout Manager. You only say what you want (a Label, a Textfield, a Label , a combobox, ...) and the Layout Manager places it justified in a panel. No clicking and moving with the mouse. But it is a long way to create complicated forms using the GridBag Layout Manager. To speed up I wrote an XML-inteface. All SWING components and their relationships are defined in XML. A class reads XML and builds SWING on the fly.
Now we made a product out of it called JEasy http://www.jeasy.de
To learn the Layout Manager its the best way. In a Repository you create all SWING objects. A preview function let you see at once what you would have to code in hours. Try it its free for evaluation.
[This message has been edited by Harry Pfohl (edited August 03, 2001).]
 
Consider Paul's rocket mass heater.
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