News Update
june 1st, 2011: Visual Editor Project was archived
(here the announcement and the archived project page)
You will find an update of the news on page
And the winner is: WindowBuilder


Would you like having a free visual editor for designing your UI in Eclipse RCP technology with Helios (3.6) or Galileo (3.5)?
Since yesterday, September 16th 2010, you do not have one choice, but two!
You can opt for Eclipse Visual Editor or for WindowBuilder Pro!

Visual Editor? But it had some problems when installed on Eclipse Helios (at least after the M4 version), isn’t it so?
True! But you can use the patch posted on the site http://sourceforge.jp/projects/tmdmaker/wiki/VisualEditor1.4.0ForHelios (http://tmdmaker.sourceforge.jp/VE-1.4.0-Helios.zip)
How it is pointed out on the site, you should start from a version of Eclipse with some Modeling plug-ins; however, if you download the Eclipse Modeling Tools version you’ll be fine.

How about WindowBuilder Pro? Wasn’t it a commercial product from Instantiations? Right: it was! Well, not in the sense that it no longer exists, but in the sense that since last month things are changed.
In early August in fact Instantiations was acquired by Google.
But yesterday’s news is this (http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com): Google releases free the following products:

  • GWT Designer
  • CodePro AnalytiX
  • WindowBuilder Pro
  • WindowTester Pro

Here http://code.google.com/intl/it-IT/webtoolkit/tools/download-wbpro.html you’ll find the Update Sites for various versions of Eclipse (Ganymede, Galileo and Helios)

Note that you will find on the palette, among the others, the Nebula widgets!
Also you can use the wizard for Databinding between widgets and model attributes.
Do you use EMF for modeling? Do not worry: EMF databinding is also supported, in addition to the JFace databinding!
What would you ever ask? Reverse engineering of your UI designed with Visual Editor? Uh, you’re demanding huh! No worries: that works, too!

Well, I mean, these are just the valuable things at first sight, but there is much more for developing an application as a whole (menus, popups, etc. ..).

What are you saying? You are also working on web programming? Then you know for sure the unparalleled power of GWT!
Well now you can design your Web UI with GWTDesigner as you would do for a desktop application.

Now really there aren’t excuses to block you from quickly develop graphical user interfaces in Java!