Introduction

SwingEmpire FormBuilder is a framework to help building form-based GUIs with JGoodies Forms. The basic driving theme is to keep different roles of developing a GUI on top of an arbitrary business model as decoupled from each other as possible - which will make it flexible, easily (re-)usable and powerful.

The package has two major parts: a visual builder to create the layout and presentation details of a form and a loader framework to use this layout.

Features

• rapid visual design of form-oriented GUIs
• targeted on JGoodies Forms
• re-usable layout data
• immediate preview in choosable LookAndFeels
• persisting layout data separated from application code
• persisting via standard XMLEncoder
• pluggable custom components
• pluggable persistence format
• integrated StyleEditor for logical layout styles
• easy data binding (on top of JGoodies Binding)
• support of ResourceBundles for presentation attributes

Note: The builder is deliberately not a WYSIWYG builder: the layout should be described independently of any concrete widget toolkit. Instead, the result of the building process is used to drive a preview of a container hooked to a given toolkit (here a UIFactory producing Swing widgets is used).