Question

I need to make application with GUI interface and I want to take a main concept from eclipse. I want to make dynamic panels which could be minimized, moved (swapped), resized, opened several at once. What can I use to do this with less coding?

Answer 1

What you’re looking for is a so-called “docking framework”. Google has a big list of them.

Obviously, you could use Eclipse RCP to implement such functionality, but then you’ll have to use SWT as GUI framework. Netbeans Platform is similar to Eclipse RCP, but for Swing. Using this has the advantage that you get a good framework for desktop applications, although it might take some time to get into the framework to use it well.

Personally, I’m using VLDocking in a project of mine I started a while ago, and am very happy with it. I already had a Swing app developed and integrating just the wanted functionality was very easy, thanks to the good tutorial on the website. But sadly VLDocking will no longer be developed (see vldocking mailing list) — let’s hope it will not break with future versions of Java/Swing/OSs.

As mentioned, Google lists many more. The ones I mentioned above are in my opinion the better ones of the free ones. Others I’ve tried had several problems, e.g. that when temporarily opening a minimized panel, it is opened in a undecorated window which makes the main window lose focus, which I don’t like.

There are a few commercial ones available as well, but I did not try them, so I can’t say much about those.