Possible Duplicate:
IDE for Swing
Hi I'm looking for some java gui builder. I used Swing Designer from instantiations and it was pretty good, but I can't use it anymore since I don't want to pay for it and it's a pain to install on linux. Eclipse just won't access the site. I love netbeans, but I'm looking for something that will give me plain java files. I do not want to have those .form files that netbeans generates.
Do you know of any good GUI builders?
I was going to say netbeans, but you already mentioned that.
Actually what I usually do is generate GroupLayout code myself. If you can handle writing HTML by hand you should be able to deal with GroupLayout manually as well, although it can be confusing since the horizontal and vertical layouts are done separately, which can be counter-intuitive at first.
But, once you get used to it, writing GUI code by hand using GroupLayout isn't the worst thing ever.
That said, I've never seen anything that comes close to the GUI designer in Visual Studio for java :(
Just do it by hand, ie not gui builders. It's seems a little more difficult to start, but once you get going and become familiar w/ the layouts and components you will have much more flexibility, understand the code that is written since you wrote it and it wasn't generated, and actually be able to layout your interface faster. Gui builders are the 80/20 they get you 80% of the way, you then finish the last 20% by hand, and have to understand the generated code, and end up changing it, and in the long run spend more time.