Best GUI designer for eclipse?

Question

I'm looking for a good GUI designer for swing in eclipse. My preference is for a free/open-source plugin.

Solution 1

Window Builder Pro is a great GUI Designer for eclipse and is now offered for free by google.

Solution 2

Here is a quite good but old comparison http://wiki.computerwoche.de/doku.php/programmierung/gui-builder_fuer_eclipse Window Builder Pro is now free at Google Web Toolkit

Solution 3

'Jigloo' is a very cool GUI designer. It is not free for commercial use however. It auto-generates code and allows for custom editing of the code it creates.

http://www.cloudgarden.com/jigloo/

Solution 4

Another good GUI designer for Eclipse is Window Builder Pro. Like Jigloo, it's not free for commercial use.

It allows you to design user interfaces for Swing, SWT and even the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

Solution 5

visualswing4eclipse looks good but the eclipse update URL didn't work for me (I raised ticket 137)

I was only able to install a previous version. Here's a url in case anyone wants it: http://visualswing4eclipse.googlecode.com/svn-history/r858/trunk/org.dyno.visual.swing.site/site.xml

The plugin actually looks very good.

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Comments

[Tom]

The Visual Editor project is nearly dead. According to the website the last release is 2 years ago, and it doesn't support Eclipse 3.3.

[Paolo Dragone]

This only works for eclipse 3.2 and not 3.3.. :-(

[Laurent K]

I know it doesn't answer exactly your needs, but I made it work recently with eclipse 3.4 wiki.eclipse.org/VE/Update

[sleske]

@Tom: No longer true; there is now a version of Visual Editor for Eclipse 3.5/Galileo: wiki.eclipse.org/VE/Update

[sleske]

There is now also a new release of Visual Editor: V 1.4.0, 30 Sep 2009

[Martin Konicek]

Windows Builder download: eclipse.org/windowbuilder/download.php

[rafalmag]

Note: this comparison is in German...

[Kris]

Update site for Eclipse Indigo release: download.eclipse.org/windowbuilder/WB/release/R201106211200/‌​3.7

[rds]

And vep is now officially dead.

[Richard]

Window Builder Pro is fantastic. Be sure to go into Window->Preferences, then WindowBuilder, to configure how variables are set up, event handlers, etc. I prefer to configure my variables to always be fields, and my event handlers to be "implement listener interface in parent class". Feels more like Visual Basic when I do that.

[Puterdo Borato]

It's a little bit slow compared to NetBeans but i like the fact of having editor that doesn't change my code so much or hinders editing as NetBeans does.

[Awi]

The project seems abandoned. I've tested it on Eclipse 3.6, and it was very unstable. Only five, almost trivial commits, in the past 3 years. code.google.com/p/visualswing4eclipse/source/list