Question

I’ve used various IDE’s (Eclipse, NetBeans, Intellij IDEA) and although all of them have GUI builder tools, they all generate the GUI in a way that ties the developer in to using that IDE.

I’m currently working on an open source project in which the GUI has been built with Netbeans so it won’t work when opening in another IDE. This is no good for me, partly because I use Intellij IDEA, but mostly because the project is being setup to build with Maven.

From the looks of things it seems like Netbeans adds code when the project builds so there is something missing when I check it out through subversion.

Answer 1

I believe that JFormDesigner fits the bill.

It’s available as a standalone application and as a plugin that can integrate with Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, and JBuilder. It generates self-contained Java code that doesn’t need anything special in order to compile.

That said, JFormDesigner itself relies upon .jfd files (they’re just XML) that describe the form so that JFormDesigner can re-open and edit the GUI. These files are only necessary to visually edit the GUI with JFormDesigner; you can still modify the generated Java code without breaking anything as long as you stay away from the specially-commented sections that JFormDesigner writes to.

I use JFormDesigner regularly (both standalone and within IntelliJ IDEA) and most of my projects are configured and built with Maven. In the few years I’ve been using it, I haven’t encountered any compatibility-related problems.

Edit: The Eclipse-specific GUI builder Jigloo should also satisfy your request. It’s been a couple of years since I last used it, but unless things have changed, it also produces self-contained Java code that will build nicely with Maven or in another IDE.

Jigloo also has the very cool ability to round-trip your code: give it a form created by hand or in another GUI builder, and it (surprisingly effectively) interprets the class and allows you to visually edit the GUI just as if you’d created it in Jigloo in the first place.