As a Java guy now I use IDEA most of the time, I’ve been using eclipse for about 6 years in the past but now I rarely open it. However, I still use NetBeans when I need to do some Swing stuff, as it provides the best GUI builder user experience in my perspective. From Sun to Oracle, now moving to Apache, after a long time of silence, Apache Netbeans 10.0 was released on Dec 27th, 2018. Wanna get a try, man?

Besides Netbeans there is another distribution called CoolBeans, I first got to know this from Hacker News Show, which is a good marketplace to know the latest new stuff from programmers who want to present and promote their work. I would highly recommend you visit there regularly.

Yesterday night I tried both NetBeans and CoolBeans, it’s similar to that of NetBeans 8.2, which I used for Swing GUI stuff. There is Window Builder for eclipse and IDEA ships GUI Designer itself, I actually tried them both at 2014 and 2016, and still, I found NetBeans is the best in this area.

Nowadays the hot topic is cloud, apps, web and machine learning, desktop application is something you probably would never touch. As for me, in the first 3 years as a Java programmer I focused on JavaEE stuff, only when I started working for a start-up company at 2014, I have to build a desktop application to be deployed to thousands of clients. I never did that before but I managed to release the first usable version in 3 weeks, it would be impossible without Netbeans.

From 2016 I started using JavaFX to build certain GUI applications, but in my personal experience I still prefer Swing - sounds strange, right? I will explain why in the future. Meanwhile, PyQT and WxPython in the Python community, Electron in Javascript community is also good stuff worthy to try. Once I played around with Electron and it would save you a lot of time as it will reuse your web development skills.

I plan to summarize and share some of my Swing work to you guys in Github recently. Hope you guys enjoy!