New Guy Question

[Mark Nibert]

This question is kind of weird. I have used visual studio before for creating gui based applications and I was wondering if Java had a similiar type of IDE program to help with creating applications.

[David Kilcy]

Eclipse

www.eclipse.org

[Sebastian Janisch]

Do you mean an IDE such as Eclipse or a Visual GUI Builder ? If so, Visual Editor is a plugin for Eclipse.

[Rob Spoor]

Don't use a graphical editor for generating code. It usually creates a big mess. You'd better read this and code using a text editor or non-graphical IDE.

[Mark Nibert]

Ok cool, I have that one downloaded but just havent been able to get much done w/ it lately. I was using the command line compiler to work through the head first java book. I still have some OOP topics to study and some experience to gain with computer programs. I have read through most of the book but I think at this point working on my own program will be a good way to get the knowledge I need to move this in to a career choice. I am probably going to work on a basic program for my wife to track income/expenses etc on. I think that I can use it to also work on connecting to databases and saving informatoin etc.

[Mark Nibert]

Any tips or suggestions on how to design a program w/out using an visual editor. I read through it on head first java but I just wanted to see what other suggestions might be out there. Any recommended tutorials?

[Jesper de Jong]

The visual GUI builder in Eclipse is unfortunately not that good, for some reason people haven't been working on it for the past 3 or 4 years.

There's also another IDE, NetBeans, which has a very good visual GUI builder. See this for more info: NetBeans IDE 6.7 Features - Swing GUI Builder

Sun's Java Tutorials are a good set of online tutorials which include a number of tutorials on how to build Swing GUI apps. There's also a lesson about using NetBeans' GUI builder in there.