Monday, September 11, 2006

Eclipse Visual Editor vs. Jigloo

Ok, I've been using the Eclipse Visual Editor for all of 15 minutes and I am sold. Up until now, I've been using Cloudgarden's Jigloo free version, yet after getting constantly annoyed by Jigloo's constant modifications to my code, prevention of using builders and the incessant warnings about how you are using the free version and that this can not be used for commercial use, I had it.

It is much easier to build with the Model View Control (MVC) architecture using the VE tool as opposed to the Jigloo builder.

Here are some comparisons and reviews of these GUI builder tools:

Jigloo Review
Comparison of Java GUI Builders
Comparison with Matisse
IBM Giving Away VE Source Code to Eclipse

How to Install VE (Visual Editor) in Eclipse

I've dabbled with Jigloo and found that Eclipse has its own GUI builder called VE. This needs the GEF and EMF plugins to work.

Here is an excellent resource that answers all the questions I had when getting started with VE, from the installation to how it works.