10 Years JFormDesigner
10 years ago, on 2004-12-13, we released JFormDesigner 1.0. Wow! Ten years is a long time. We're very proud of what we have built, and we're looking forward to continuing the success.
JFormDesigner 1.0 was the first professional GUI designer that did support JGoodies FormLayout, the most advanced grid-based layout manager for Swing at this time.
Our vision was to develop the best and most innovative GUI designer for Swing to help our customers to increase their productivity and create professional looking forms.
JFormDesigner 1.0 introduced innovations not seen before in other GUI builders. For example:
- Column and row headers: The first time it was possible to easily insert, delete and drag-and-drop whole columns/rows.
- Excellent JGoodies FormLayout, TableLayout and GridBagLayout support.
- Automatic GridBagLayout gaps avoids the hassle to set GridBagConstraints.insets correctly for consistent gaps.
- Generation of nested classes allows you to organize your source code in an object-oriented way.
The first version was only available as stand-alone application. Today, JFormDesigner is the only GUI designer on the market that is available as plug-ins for all major IDEs (Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, JDeveloper and JBuilder).
Some Statistics
- 1,800,000 downloads
- 107,000 evaluation licenses
- 23,000 newsletter subscribers
- 5,400 commits
- 2,800 .java files
- 63 releases
- 13 supported layout managers
- 5 IDE plug-ins
- 1.2 GB git bare repository size (compressed)
What's next?
Development of new features was a bit slow the last years. Sorry, but we're going to speed-up. MigLayout support is already under hard development for JFormDesigner 6. Then we'll continue with JavaFX support. Stay tuned.