FormDev Software released the latest version of its payware Swing form designer, JFormDesigner 4.0. Long considered to be among the most capable WYSIWYG Swing design tools, JFormDesigner was recently challenged to that position by NetBeans' own Swing UI designer, Matisse, in part due to NetBeans' support for GroupLayout. The latest JFormDesigner version now adds support for GroupLayout, as well as for the open-source JGoodies FormsLayout and TableLayout APIs.
GroupLayout makes it easy to develop Swing UIs that look idiomatic on various OS platforms, in part because it takes responsibility for many layout decisions, such as proper spacing and alignment, attributes that are prescribed differently on different operating systems. GroupLayout is now part of JRE 6, and several Swing-friendly IDEs and design tools have started supporting it. JFormDesigner's support for GroupLayout is highly graphical in that it provides visual guidelines for spacing and anchoring UI components in a GroupLayout-based container.
In addition, JFormDesigner 4.0 supports the latest version of the JGoodies FormsLayout API. FormsLayout is an open-source layout manager that makes it natural to express the design of Swing containers where layout is based on rows and columns. Each column can have an associated ColumnSpec and each row can have its own RowSpec, detailing alignment, line spacing, component gap, and other parameters for a column or row. JGoodies FormLayout 1.2 introduces a more concise syntax, allowing JFormDesigner to generate correspondingly shorter Java source from a visual design.
Another Swing layout manager that received some traction in recent years is the open-source TableLayout that follows some of the conventions in HTML-based tables for specifying Swing component placing. While less flexible than JGoodies FormsLayout, TableLayout also requires less code. JFormsDesigner now correctly generates the TableLayout Swing code from a graphical design.
Other new features in FormsDesigner 4.0 include plug-in based deployment to Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, and JBuilder, as well as better localization support for Swing UIs.
In your Swing development, do you prefer to code Swing UIs by hand, or do you use a graphical design tool, such as JFormDesigner?
I've used JFormDesigner 3.x and liked it a lot. (I haven't done any Swing lately so I don't have the 4.0 version yet.) It's definitely much better than doing it by hand and you're not tied to a specific IDE (unlike Matisse). Honestly, given how much code is required to build even a simple Swing GUI, I can't imagine people still do this stuff by hand (even though I know they do). JFormDesigner should pay for itself just building your first page with it.
Previous Topic
