Swing JavaBuilder 1.1 : Declarative UIs With Maximum Productivity

SwingJavaBuilder (SJB) is fantastic. With its compact YAML declaration of the GUI and a few conventions, it's about as easy as I can imagine to build a nice interface. I've done a fair number of Java GUI interfaces "by-hand" and am sick of writing the extensive, and sometimes complex, boilerplate code. SJB provides easy component creation, listener definition, data binding, and especially nice layout (using MigLayout). Using the Netbeans Matisse GUI editor worked ok for simple interface designs, but brought me no joy when they got complex -- simple editing mistakes made such a mess of things that starting over was easiest. And forget portability. Do not use it.

Undergraduate Java programming students often hit the GUI wall, where the difficulty of developing an interface discourages them enormously. It's sadly too late to move students to declarative interfaces, but something like SwingJavaBuilder would have allowed them to move into GUIs with relative ease.

I've tried other declarative GUI packages before, but thought SwingJavaBuilder to be better. One that I'd consider more if I had the time is Apache Pivot but the XML looked annoyingly verbose compared to the compact YAML notation at first glance.

Jacek Furmankiewicz deserves some kind of award for this work and his rapid response to any questions.

Cons: You have to learn the compact YAML notation (easy) and how to use MigLayout (far easier than the Java layout mess). Errors are caught at runtime instead of compile time, and the diagnostic messages are not always as quite as helpful as one would wish.

It's hard to imagine that someone wouldn't prefer this after using on just one project.

This project seems to fit my needs perfectly. Before I decide to build an app on top of it I'd like to ask if anybody had experience with Rails backend integration? I'd like to make an intranet desktop client for app written on JRuby & RoR. Does Swing JavaBuilder consume Restful resources?

Any updates on the Vaadin version of Java Builder? :-)

Call me simple minded but I fail to see the benefit of learning a new Syntax in Yaml combined with Java to create a Java App.  So now the developer has to have 2 mind sets?  The reason Wicket is so popular (and awesome) is that it eliminates the amount of stuff you have to know.  i.e. no Java Script, no Struts config files - hence you eliminate the XML mind set - after setting up web.xml you are in pure Java Mode (HTML is in a separate thought domain).

If what we are achieving after wacking together the extra Yaml files is databinding wouldn't it be easier to learn Spring Rich Client?  Or write your own databinder via reflection?

Sorry this might appear extremely simple to those who are in a position to appreciate Yaml - maybe I should do a little research on it - but I'm just trying to understand the mind set here.

It uses declarative UIs (in a YAML/Python-style format), controls layout via a MigLayout DSL, offers databinding via BetterBeansBinding, automatically wires listeners to methods, features build-in input validation and much more. In short, it's designed to make IDE-specific builders like NetBeans Matisse obsolete. -BikesDirect