Implementing a simple UI editor in Java

Question

Hi,

I'm thinking about writing a simple UI designer in Java. I'm just playing with ideas at the moment to see if it is feasible.

It would be good to have something like this as all of our UIs are generated from XML. Just wondering if anyone has tried anything like this before. I know there will be a lot of effort in doing something like this.

Does anyone know of any 3rd party products that already do something like this?

If not then at a simple level, it will have drag and drop support for any component that can be positioned on a panel. Then extra bits will be added. Are there any good samples on the net for this?

Cheers

Answer 1

Which GUI technology are you using? Swing? NetBeans has a very good drag-and-drop Swing GUI editor. For Eclipse there are several plugins.

If you want to see other projects in which a Swing GUI is generated from XML config files, there are different libraries that do this.

Answer 2

Dated back to 2005, this has an overview of Java UI Builders:
http://www.fullspan.com/articles/java-gui-builders.html

Here is a page on how to use the Eclipse Visual Editor:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-ecvisual/

Here is a good page on the different approaches to build UIs in Java:
http://leepoint.net/notes-java/GUI/misc/80gui-generator.html

Answer 3

Eclipse 4.0 Developer Preview was just released with an xml based toolkit called XWT. It can be styled with CSS and has a GUI builder. This is a developer preview and there will be some changes over the next year as it progresses to release 4.1, but it is useable right now and the community support is really good.