Netbeans had been my favorite IDE for quite a while. Besides the fact that it has all the features a modern IDE has to have, it has easy-to-use GUI tools for Java programming. Java has been my favorite programming language for several years now. I not only use Java for scientific algorithm development, also for many GUI tools. Netbeans fits the bill perfectly.
Netbeans generates Java codes with a developer's drag and drop. The results are most time usable but not precise. The generated codes are locked, i.e., not editable. Fine tuning the GUI layout is nearly impossible. Recently, I needed to arrange the GUI layout of a Java project precisely, and Netbeans' GUI tool was just not satisfying enough. I went on searching and came across with WindowBuilder.
WindowBuilder is a Eclipse plugin for Java GUI programming. Like Netbeans, it let a developer drag and drop. Like Netbeans, after the Java code is generated after dragging and dropping, a developer can edit the code and WindowBuilder can read back the manually edited code and new GUI can be displayed under design mode. However, WindowBuilder does the job better than Netbeans does. The cycle goes on. This is simply amazing. I still like Netbeans and use it from time to time. But most of time I use Eclpise. Of course, I spend a lot of time developing for Android and Eclipse is practically the only IDE for it.
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