Abeille Forms Designer

Abeille Forms Designer is a tool for quickly designing cross-platform graphical user interfaces. Forms Designer is a Swing based application and uses Swing components.

Forms Designer depends on the JGoodies FormLayout Manager (Forms Designer includes all the software you need). The FormLayout is a powerful, open source layout manager which you can use to programmatically create layouts in Java. Abeille works on top of the FormLayout and allows you to build forms visually using drag and drop. Abeille also includes support for images and painting effects such as gradients, textures, and dynamic colors (based on current look and feel).

The FormLayout project is located at http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/libraries/forms/. Abeille includes all the files you need. To understand this layout manager, it is important to read the FormLayout whitepaper included with this documentation (included with permission from Karsten Lentzsch).

The FormLayout is a grid based layout manager. Forms can be created by defining a grid and adding Swing components to cells on the grid. Each cell, row, and column can be constrained to a specified size and resize behavior. In Abeille users can create forms by dragging Swing components from a pallette to a cell on the currently active form. Once GUI is completed, the design information is saved to a file. Abeille is not a code generator. Rather developers create form files using the designer and reference these files in their own applications to display the forms.