Dec 15 2014

10 Years JFormDesigner

10 Years

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:

JFormDesigner 1.0

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.

2014-12-15 ,

May 18 2014

JFormDesigner 5.2 Released

We're pleased to announce the immediate availability of JFormDesigner 5.2, now with JDeveloper plug-in, Java 8 support, JGoodies Forms 1.8, GroupLayout design improvements and more.

JDeveloper plug-in

Feature Highlights:

  • JDeveloper plug-in
  • Java 8 support
  • JGoodies Forms 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8 support
  • GroupLayout design improved
  • Visualization of gaps in GroupLayout
  • Improved tree file chooser
  • Preferences search in NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA plug-ins
  • and more...

See What's New in JFormDesigner 5.2 for the significant or more interesting changes.
Please have a look at the change log for a complete list of changes.

Download JFormDesigner 5.2

Customer information: JFormDesigner 5.2 is free of charge for existing customers if the "Free updates until" date of your license key is 2012-09-01 or later. Upgrades are available here.

2014-05-18 , ,

May 14 2013

JFormDesigner 5.1.1 with IntelliJ IDEA 12.x support

We've just released JFormDesigner 5.1.1, which is now compatible with IntelliJ IDEA 12 and 12.1, has been tested with NetBeans 7.3, supports Eclipse plug-in in Java 7 VM on Mac OS X (read note below), fixes minor bugs and brings some minor improvements.

See Change Log for details and download JFormDesigner 5.1.1.

Eclipse plug-in in Java 7 VM on Mac OS X

The JFormDesigner plug-in for Eclipse depends on a JRE class that embeds Swing into SWT. Unfortunately, when migrating Apple Java 6 to Oracle Mac Java 7, the class was not migrated. There is work in progress to bring it back, but currently it is only available in JDK 7u12 Developer Preview (1.7.0_12-ea) (from jdk7.java.net/download.html), but not in Java SE 7u21 (from oracle.com). See also Java Bug 7154778 and Eclipse Bug 374199.

2013-05-14 , , , , ,