Any good java programmers here???

[will2425]

I'm a 3rd year computer science student and i need help creating a GUI in java, anyone here with any experience in this kind of thing who would be willing to offer advice? any help would be greatly appreciated!

- Will

[dern]

What sort of information do you need?

If you're looking for basics on how the stuff goes together and how the threads work then there are some really good basic swing tutorials on the sun java site.

[TheExcession]

I always found swing layouts to be a royal PITA to code by hand in java.

I think the Eclipse IDE (you are using Eclipse aren't you?) has a form designer plug-in now which means you can layout your GUI graphically rather than by hand. I downloaded the plug-in a while ago but haven't had call to use it yet.

I'll happily answer any Java questions for you if you can be a bit more specific.

best
Ex

[SlidingSideways]

I've used Jigloo (www.cloudgarden.com/jigloo/), which is free for non-comercial use.
It's still not as easy as Visual Basics GUI designer, but it does take a lot of the pain away, and the code it generates isn't comletely awful.

[dern]

Always preferred to do the layouts by hand. I tried a few wizards but they seem unable to grasp grid bag properly and always produce grim code. Haven't looked at any for a while though... what's the name of the eclipse one excession, I'd like to take a look at that.

Cheers,

Mark

[aspender]

You should take a look at using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform to give you an underlying infrastructure, including the SWT libraries, on which to build your client:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Ric
www.eclipse.org/home/categories/rcp.php

[rebelstar]

NetBeans (at least, v6) also has a graphical GUI designer these days. I've not really played with it, but it's another option for you.