Professional Swing GUI Building

Design Swing GUIs by dragging and positioning GUI components from a palette onto a canvas. The GUI builder automatically takes care of the correct spacing and alignment. Click into JLabels, JButtons, ButtonGroups, JTrees, JTextFields, ComboBoxes and edit their properties directly in place. You can use the GUI builder to prototype GUIs right in front of customers.

Intuitive and Customizable

You can choose whether the GUI code should be generated with fully qualified or simple class names. The helpbar displays context-sensitive hints about what can be done with the selected component and suggests shortcuts that can speed up your work in the future. The NetBeans IDE also comes with built-in support for GUI localization and accessibility. If you use JDK 6 Update 10, you can now preview your forms in the new Nimbus look and feel.

Desktop Application Development

We recommend using the NetBeans GUI Builder to design user interfaces when developing a Swing desktop application based on the NetBeans Platform. Rather than creating your own visual Java editor from scratch, you can reuse open-source code from the GUI Builder, and add custom Java Beans to the palette.

Standard and Custom GUI Components

The extensible Component Palette comes with pre-installed Swing and AWT components and includes a visual menu designer. Use the Component Inspector to view a component's tree and properties.

Beans Binding technology (JSR 295) Support

Take advantage of Beans Binding technology and the Java Persistence API to create Swing desktop database applications more easily. Using the new Java Desktop Application project template, you can quickly set up a form that displays a database table and also enables you to modify the database. Bind a database table to an existing form by dragging a table from the Runtime window onto the form.