Wijsmullerbros.nl

Eclipse 4 is definitely going to be a major improvement, first of all because of the fixed maven support, but there is more!

Part of e4 (the new eclipse), is a new way to describe SWT layouts, named "XWT" (do not confuse with xwt.org).
In one of the projects I was working on, we used Google web toolkit, that has this thing called UIBinder to help creating layouts. I found it quite convenient and an easy way to get a good feel for the actual layout.

It turns out that there's a tool called WindowBuilder pro, created by Google and recently donated to eclipse. This allows for designers to visually create layouts for Swt, Swing, GWT, etc. It works like a charm!

Now, since I'm using maven to fetch my dependencies, the project setup was not completely trivial. The libraries for XWT are not documented that well and are not available in any public maven repositories.
So, to get started I had to copy libraries from my eclipse installation (that uses swt), and mix and match the right ones. After having done this though, it's rock stable.

Actually there was a typo of the e4 XWT site which totally broke the system. After long dwellings along forums, I finally found the problem. I updated the e4 XWT page to show the correct examples.

http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/XWT

I'm very glad that I don't have to fall back to the Netbeans Swing designer and/or code generation.
I will post the list of libraries needed here asap, since I can highly recommend using XWT!