I created a program with a Swing GUI in NetBeans a while back using the Graphical Editor. I now needed a web version but since I use eclipse now I copied + pasted the code into a new Web Applet project. I found some problems I didn’t spot before and updated the code in the web applet.
I want to add some buttons to the GUI, but one problem is its an annoyance to find the part of the code where NetBeans put all the variable declarations, then find another part of the code where all the fields are initialised, then find the other part of the code where the layout needs to be defined, then find the other part of the code where all the action listeners are added, etc… Another problem is that the Swing layouts are complex and also an annoyance to hard code… it is difficult to judge what the exact outcome will look like when you have to edit GroupLayouts with other swing components already layed out in them.
Also, I can’t edit this in NetBeans because the Generator is very fussy and if I copy+paste code in there it wont read it as a Java Form nor generate an XML file which I think it uses to manage your layout.
Are there any free GUI designers out there that take a bunch of java swing code and allow you to graphically edit it? How do professionals manage their graphical layouts?
So I should have implemented the Model-View approach from the start.
Here is a nice tutorial on the subject:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/OnToJava/ONTOJAVA755.HTML