Drag and Drop Java GUI [closed]

Answer 1

Perhaps look at the Eclipse Modelling Framework. It is a good starting point for a modeling tool.

Answer 2

There are few GUI builders available.

--> Netbeans

--> SpeedJG

--> IntelliJIdea

--> Eclipse

Answer 3

While it seems to be a good idea at first glance to create a UI with drag and drop, I always found that the UI editors made me much less productive than writing the code by hand:

1. The property editor for UI elements always shows 150 properties which I don't need and I have to scroll every time to get the one I always change.
2. Changing properties needs too many clicks with the mouse (and sometimes the aim of a world class StarCraft player)
3. There is no way to reuse common things like colors, texts, initialization
4. The resulting code it a large, unreadable mess without structure
5. There is no code completion

Answer 4

WindowBuilder (Swing, SWT, GWT etc.) was a commercial product before Instantiatons was acquired by Google and has been proposed as a new project to the Eclipse Foundation. While you'll certainly always have the greatest flexibility with hand coding (like Aaron suggests in his answer) I have had a lot of great experience with the tool.

The project is in Eclipse Incubation currently, but has been used in production for years. If you want to create a GUI with Drag'n'Drop you should definitely have a look at WindowBuilder.

Answer 5

JGraphx has a nice example called editor that does exactly what you are trying to accomplish. Just look in the downloaded zip file in the /examples/com/mxgraph/examples/swing/editor - there is everything you need.

Alternatively you might want to use JUNG http://jung.sourceforge.net/. For this one see the following demo - it might give you some clues: http://jung.sourceforge.net/applet/grapheditordemo.html