Hi,

I am pleased to announce the release of JFormDesigner 1.0 Release
Candidate, a innovative WYSIWYG GUI designer for Swing user interfaces.

It is easy and intuitive to use and provides a lot of powerful features
like IntelliGap, move of columns or rows, in-place-editing of tab titles
and titled borders, generation of nested Java classes and others.
JFormDesigner supports various layout managers like JGoodies FormLayout,
TableLayout, GridBagLayout, BorderLayout and others.

JFormDesigner is a real WYSIWYG designer with lot of visual feedback.
During drag and drop, you will see exactly where a component will be placed.

The column and row headers (for grid based layout managers) shows the
structure of the layout (including column/row indices, alignment,
growing, grouping) and allows you to insert or delete columns/rows
and change column/row properties.

It's also possible to drag and drop columns/rows (incl. contained
components and gaps). This allows you to swap columns or move rows in
seconds. Have you seen this elsewhere?

The advanced GridBagLayout support allows the specification of
horizontal and vertical gaps (as in TableLayout). JFormDesigner
automatically computes the GridBagConstraints.insets for all components.
This makes designing a form with consistent gaps using GridBagLayout
much easier. No longer wrestling with Insets ;-)

JFormDesigner generates/updates Java code. No runtime library is
required. The code generator is able to generate nested classes. You can
specify a class name for each component in your form. This allows you to
organize your source code in a OO way. For example, if you have a
JTabbedPane with some tabs, you can put each tab component into its own
nested class.

JFormDesigner stores the form meta data in XML files.
For the case that you don't like Java code generating GUI designers,
I plan to provide a small royalty-free runtime library, which enables
you to load JFormDesigner XML files within you applications.

JFormDesigner is based on the JavaBeans standard.
It supports/uses BeanInfos, BeanDescriptors, PropertyDescriptors,
PropertyEditors (incl. custom and paintable editors), Introspector, ...

And there are a lot of other nifty features...

Except some minor bugs, the code is complete for the final 1.0.
It's a release candidate mainly because the documentation is not complete.

For more information, please visit: www.jformdesigner.com
and watch the online demo at www.jformdesigner.com/demos/

Give it a try. Download it. Get a free evaluation license. Enjoy!

Best regards,
Karl Tauber
www.jformdesigner.com