Eclipse is a very nice (and better yet: free!) IDE. Unfortunately the last time I used it, it didn't appear to have any type of visual builder for Swing. I may not have dug deeply enough. You have to do all the form layout yourself. Luckily, if you build a few framework tools, this doesn't add as much time as I had feared.





The eclipse project is very extensive. I only used it for a few weeks, but I was exceptionally impressed with it.




Borland's JBuilder is very nice. Unfortunately, the price tag is prohibitive unless you can get your employer to pay for it. Even then, the price tag is painful enough that cash-conscious employers will need some justification.

Unfortunately due to the design of VAJ, you cannot switch JDK's easily (or at all)... VAJ wraps each Visual Object in it's own class to interface with Visual Developer... I don't know about 4.0, but up till 4.0, VAJ was written in Smalltalk. (I used to work with one of the developers involved in the Visual development portion of VAJ -- and used VAJ for years; and love it).

JBuilder is an IDE that has an excelent visual builder for Swing... I think NetBeans also has a good one. These are two that I have used... but there are others.

Stephen McConnell