Visual Swing for Eclipse For Mac

If you are using the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to develop Java applications, having access to the Swing Java Graphical User Interface toolkit can be extremely beneficial.

Visual Swing for Eclipse is a collection of Eclipse plug-in designed to provide access to a Netbeans-like GUI designed within the Eclipse IDE. Of course, to be able to use it, you must have the Java Runtime and Eclipse beforehand.

The next step is to install the plug-ins via the Eclipse mechanism. You can go to the Eclipse Help menu, select the Install New Software entry, press the Add button in the newly opened window, press the archive button and then select the downloaded zip file. Restarting Eclipse should complete the process.

Another method is to copy the “features” and “plugins” folders into the root Eclipse directory. After you restart Eclipse you should be able to view the installed plug-ins in the Preferences window.

Visual Swing for Eclipse can be used to design Swing components by using anchors, layouts and baselines similar to the NetBeans designer. You can use the plug-ins to generate and parse Java code, preview the source code, use visual trees and tables while designing and employ a visual designer that includes drag and drop support for the menus.

To sum up, Visual Swing for Eclipse can prove to be a very useful tool if you are developing Java code by using the Eclipse IDE and you want to use a GUI designer based on the Swing toolkit.