My development team consists of PowerBuilder developers. We are starting to move to Java and when I mentioned we don't need GUI builders, a revolt nearly started.

Unfortunately, my favorite IDE (Eclipse) does not come with a GUI builder. Since I can't live without Eclipse, we are building the GUI using the NetBeans GUI Builder and doing the rest of development in Eclipse.

I have found I can create GUIs a lot faster using a GUI builder. NetBeans allows you to use any layout manager and to embed them. It also allows you to add your own custom controls to it's component palette, so I can create custom components and make them available for other developers.

I'm hoping the GUI builders are going to move towards using the XMLEncoder to save the interfaces instead of spitting out 100s of lines of ugly code. Maybe someday...

Regards,
John