I am a Visual Studio (early versions and .NET) developer for many years,
including c# and asp, and even back to the old days of Microsoft Transaction
Manager (an early object manager of sorts).  I now need to move into a new
environment of Java, Eclipse, and JBoss.  I have started studying the
language and doing just fine so far using Eclipse to compile and run console
applications.

What I would like to do, just for learning experience is put together a
couple of programs that populate a Windows type form from a DB, modify the
data, validate it, save it, etc.  This is the sort of thing you can do
pretty quickly in VS.NET.  Where my problem is, is trying to determine what
I should/shouldn't use to provide me the environment for doing this.  I see
there are plug-ins for Eclipse like SWT Designer, Matisse, (several more
here of course) etc. but I hate to invest time in getting this set up and
working, only to find out that it's not really the 'popular' way of doing
things in Java. I've also had my eye on MyEclipse - looks like they sort of
roll eveything into one place for you for $50.

As I progress I'll switch over to web apps, ejb (I believe), and JBoss and
need to get familiar with JSP, servlets, etc., but for the moment I just
want to start getting comfortable with the language and some tools.

I suppose what i'm asking is, as a beginner, what should I be looking at as
the top candidates for GUI form design and other Eclipse plugins to get me
started ?

jim in fl