Matisse in Eclipse

Question

I have just installed Eclipse 3.4 and found out that there is not a plugin to create Swing applications yet. I also have found that there is a Matisse implementation in MyEclipse IDE, but I'd like to now whether there is such a Matisse plugin for free.

Answer 1

I did a quick Google search and found that you could use Netbeans Matisse and Eclipse in parallel:

NetBeans Wiki: UsingNetbeansMatisseAndEclipseInParallel

It seems to basically involve building the Swing GUI in Netbeans and doing the other coding tasks from within Eclipse.

Answer 2

Although this is not a true answer to your question, you may as well look at alternative solutions in terms of layout management: Matisse and GroupLayout are neither the only way, nor the best one, to define your GUI forms.

I would suggest you take a look at:

• MigLayout (very powerful and quite simple)
• and DesignGridLayout (quite powerful and very simple)

Both are open source and have a friendly license (not GPL). A quick search on Google will give you the links immediately.

Disclaimer: I am one of DesignGridLayout both project owners, but I point you to it because I'm convinced it provides a better way to define Swing layouts.

Answer 3

there isnt one for free. myeclipse is the only way to run matisse inside eclipse.

Answer 4

Instatiations Swing Designer is the best in my opinion. We settled on it after trying may different Eclipse plugins.