Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Jump to bottom

Update of the UI builder FAQ entry #1223

Merged
merged 1 commit into from Mar 1, 2024
Merged

Update of the UI builder FAQ entry #1223

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Diff view
Diff view
27 changes: 8 additions & 19 deletions docs/FAQ/FAQ_Are_there_any_visual_composition_editors_available_for_SWT.md
View file
Open in desktop
@@ -1,29 +1,18 @@


FAQ Are there any visual composition editors available for SWT?
===============================================================

Several free and commercial products provide visual composition editors, or GUI builders, for SWT. These tools are especially appealing to people who are not yet skilled in all the intricacies of the SWT layout mechanisms and do not yet know what kinds of widgets are available to choose from.

After doing an informal poll, we discovered that none of the respondents in the Eclipse development team uses a visual builder to implement Eclipse. The UI for Eclipse is written manually in SWT, using an additional UI framework called JFace to take care of some of the repetitive aspects of writing UIs. Furthermore, when defining a new dialog, the developers often use the Monkey see, monkey do rule: They first find one that is close to the intended result; then, the new UI is cloned from the inspiration source and modified until it fits the needs of the new application.

With the growing popularity of SWT, more and more developers want to prototype and develop user interfaces with SWT. Visual builders help less experienced developers by eliminating most of the guesswork from the UI design labor. Widgets can be selected from a panel, and attributes can be chosen and assigned values from a limited set of options. The most successful builders offer fully synchronized views of the UI being developed and the generated source code to implement the UI.

Visual builders have been a long time coming for SWT, but a number of free and commercial GUI builders are finally available.

Free Plug-ins
-------------

* [_The Eclipse Visual Editor Project_](https://wiki.eclipse.org/Visual_Editor_Project). The goal of this Eclipse project is to build a framework for creating Eclipse-based GUI builders. This project follows the general Eclipse philosophy of creating a platform- and language-independent framework, with language- and platform-specific layers on top. This project provides GUI builders for SWT/RCP and Swing applications.
Several free and commercial products provide visual composition editors, or GUI builders, for SWT.
These tools are especially appealing to people who are not yet skilled in all the intricacies of the SWT layout mechanisms and do not yet know what kinds of widgets are available to choose from.

* _V4ALL Assisi GUI-Builder_. This SourceForge GUI builder project targets both SWT and Swing. So far, it is the work of a single developer, and there does not appear to be much activity on it.
The UI for Eclipse is written manually in SWT, using an additional UI framework called JFace to take care of some of the repetitive aspects of writing UIs. Furthermore, when defining a new dialog, the developers often use the Monkey see, monkey do rule: They first find one that is close to the intended result; then, the new UI is cloned from the inspiration source and modified until it fits the needs of the new application.

* [_JellySWT_](http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/jelly/jellyswt.html). Jelly is a scripting engine that uses XML as its scripting language. The goal of JellySWT is to allow you to describe a UI by using Jelly script and then have it generate the Java code automatically. The idea is that it takes care of the tedious layout code for you. This isn't really a visual composition editor, but it is a GUI builder of sorts.
Developers want to prototype and develop user interfaces with SWT.
Visual builders help less experienced developers by eliminating most of the guesswork from the UI design labor.
Widgets can be selected from a panel, and attributes can be chosen and assigned values from a limited set of options.
The most successful builders offer fully synchronized views of the UI being developed and the generated source code to implement the UI.

Commercial Plug-ins
-------------------
Multiple commercial builders are available and the main free GUI builders is [WindowBuilder](https://github.com/eclipse-windowbuilder/windowbuilder).

* [_SWT designer_](http://www.swt-designer.com). This commercial plug-in to Eclipse, which targets only SWT, is fairly new as a commercial product but is based on an open source project that has been around for a while and has a strong following.

See Also:
---------
Expand Down