Jigloo GUI Builder User's Guide

Introduction

Cloudgarden's Jigloo GUI Builder is an Eclipse plugin which allows you to build and manage GUIs using both Sun's Swing and Eclipse's SWT toolkits.

It is free for non-commercial use, but a Professional license must be purchased for commercial use - please visit the www.cloudgarden.com website.

It creates and manages code to create all the parts of the GUI as well as handle events, and shows you the GUIs as they are being built, allowing you to experiment with the more complex features of the Swing GridBagLayout or SWT's FormLayout, for instance. It also offers very advanced and powerful code-handling features - fine-grained control over code-generation and parsing, as well as visual inheritance and custom controls.

It can lead to a very large time-saving (over hand-coding) for GUI development and maintainance tasks, and because the Jigloo GUI builder is integrated with the Eclipse IDE the invaluable code-management features of Eclipse are immediately available to further modify the code generated by Jigloo.

It can manage java classes created previously by hand, or using an IDE such as JBuilder, Netbeans etc. It is able to handle most common ways of constructing GUI code, though it is not able to handle certain exceptional cases - but these limitations are described in the documentation.

It supports visual inheritance - Jigloo can be used to build classes which are extensions of other visual classes (an example might be a generic ShopFrame which extends JFrame and has generic labels and containers designed to be customized, and a FlowerShop class which extends ShopFrame and customizes the inherited generic components). Jigloo can be used to design classes which extend any type of visual class - though abstract or non-public classes require a small modification to the code.

In detail, the Jigloo GUI builder offers the following features:

Basic:


Code Handling:


Layout:

Advanced: