I'm working on swing projects now for years and I agree, coding UI by hand is somewhat annoying as you don't see on the fly what you're currently doing. Also layout manager support is not as good as it could be and the documentation of GridBagLayout is weak. But if you got it, you can do almost everthing with it. IMHO a powerfull GUI design tool is needed. (I didn't test Matisse yet) .
I don't see any benefit in using XML. You must know XML AND Swing (or whatever GUI API), it's very unintuitive to handle, no sophisticated error handling in XML if something went wrong. The only reason to describe GUIs with XML is if you want to have some generic description that you want to convert to Swing, AWT, HTML... |
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