On 03/06/2014 17:00, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
There's no GUI builder for DWT, if that's what you're looking for. But
there is a plugin for Eclipse called WindowBuilder [1]. That will output
Java code for SWT (which DWT is a port of).

[1] http://www.eclipse.org/windowbuilder/

Personally, I think GUI builders are likely a bit overrated nowadays. I do a lot of work with SWT, and I am a big fan of rich IDE toolchains, but I never felt much compelled to use an SWT GUI builder.

They are good for beginners, which can get started easily, but, at least for SWT specifically, once you become fairly knowledgeable about it, its easy to create UI controls programmatically. If one is using more complex grid layouts, it can be trickier to get things right at first when just doing it programmatically, but I don't think the productivity difference is that significant.

I think the key thing here is that GUI builders became less important when the internet became so massively popular. In the early VisualStudio/VB days, the GUI builder was very helpful since it would allow one to get started building some controls easily, whereas if you had to do all programmatically, and look up the API for that, it could be tricky to find a way to do what you wanted. But nowadays its easy to search the internet for examples, snippets, etc.. SWT in particular has loads of those.


--
Bruno Medeiros
https://twitter.com/brunodomedeiros

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