Java & GUI: Builder, Frameworks, Technologies - State of the art?

Question

i'm looking for state of the art gui builder, frameworks and technologies about java gui developing.

I'm very interested in white papers, workshops and similar stuff. Im not really familiar with the topic.

The newest and maybe the 'hotest' gui builder seems to be Googles WindowBuilder Pro. And whats about the cross-language Qt jambi? Anyone knows something about CaptainCasa? Or some very good Swing extensions?

I need some motivational thoughts! Thanks! :)

Answer 1

tl;dr version. Decide on a platform (web/desktop). Learn the platform. You'll learn GUI programming as you go along. A good place to start is the Java tutorial by Oracle. There's a specific trail for GUI programming.

Slow down. You've apparently accumulated all sorts of information, some of which isn't useful to you as far as I can tell. Google's WindowBuilder Pro is for GWT (web GUIs). What kind of GUI are you planning to build? Web? Desktop? For desktop, your IDE of choice will have a (supposedly) decent GUI builder (Netbeans, IDEA, Eclipse). For web, unless you're using a framework that explicity allows that and has an IDE plugin for the purpose (like GWT or Vaadin) you're pretty much on your own.

Unless you're trying to learn about user interfaces and/or user experience, I'd suggest you don't treat it like an academic pursuit in itself. The GUI is merely the interface users will use to experience your application. Less important the tools you use to build it and more the entire experience of the user.

Answer 2

End user GUI experience needs to be easy and predictable. That depends upon your ability to design irrespective of the tools used.

Rest, choose the tool which is easy to learn, generates maintainable code, comes cheap, easy to extend and most importantly provides plugins to be added in the existing Frameworks like Spring, Struts etc.