SWT Designer v4.3.0 Released!

Major new release includes support for editing RCP Perspectives, visual tab order editing, Eclipse 3.1.2 & 3.2M5 support, enhanced SWT FormLayout, enhanced custom SWT widget support, code gen enhancements, plus many other new features.

Support for Eclipse 3.1.2 & 3.2M5

Support for creating and editing RCP Perspectives New wizard for creating Perspective Factories Perspective declaration added to plugin.xml Perspective palette includes common and local views Change view locations and sizes with drag/drop Create folders by stacking views Manage placeholder & fast views and view & perspective shortcuts

Support for visual tab order editing Clicking "Tab Order" button places editor into tab order mode Click on components in desired tab order

Enhanced NLS support Show widget icons in locale table Added "Delete key" & "Delete locale" actions in locale table Show tooltip with components in locale table

Enhanced SWT support Support for alignment to any control in FormLayout Enhanced attachment feedback in FormLayout Support for custom SWT property editors Support for cross-parent alignment for SWT absolute layout

Enhanced JFace & RCP support Support for SectionParts Support for properties of buttons on JFace Dialogs Support for "parent" argument of ViewPart.createPartControl(Composite parent) Support for custom FormToolkit's

Code Generation & Parsing enhancements Major performance enhancements (windows open 2X-3X faster) Support for "${default_name}" in variable name template Enhanced support for factories Support for Java5 enum properties and EnumSet

Editor & Property Pane enhancements Support for required properties Preference for highlight/ignore required properties Show class hierarchy tooltip and double click to open New tree-based image selection dialog Support for selecting images from classpath jar's

"I had forgotten just how much fun and easy it can be building Java GUIs." --Sally Rich, RSS Solutions

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What is Designer?

Designer is a powerful and easy to use two-way Java GUI designer based on Eclipse SWT technology. It is very easy to create Java GUI applications without spending a lot of time writing code to display simple forms. With SWT Designer you can create complicated windows in minutes. Use the visual designer and Java code will be generated for you. You can easily add controls using drag-and-drop, add event handlers to your controls, change various properties of controls using a property editor and much more.

How does it work?

Designer is built as a plugin to Eclipse and the various WebSphere Studio IDEs (WSSD, WSAD, WSED, etc.). The plugin builds an abstract syntax tree (AST) to navigate the source code and uses GEF to display and manage the visual presentation. Using WYSIWYG layout tools, you don't need to write any lines of java code - the code will be generated for you by the designer. You can easily add any control to a composite by using drag-and-drop, add an event handler to your controls, change various properties of controls using property editors and much more. Generated code doesn't require any additional non-SWT library to compile and run: all of the generated code can be used without having Designer installed. Designer can read and write almost any format and reverse-engineer most hand-written Java GUI code. It also supports free form code editing (make changes anywhere...not just in special areas) and most user refactorings (you can move, rename and subdivide methods without a problem).

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