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Eclipse WindowBuilder. This tutorial describes the usage of WindowBuilder for creating user interfaces.

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1. Using the SWT Designer (WindowBuilder) for visual UI design

1.1. What is SWT Designer?

SWT Designer is a visual editor used to create graphical user interfaces. It is a two way parser, e.g., you can edit the source code or use a graphical editor to modify the user interface. SWT Designer synchronizes between both representations.

SWT Designer is part of the WindowBuilder project. WindowBuilder provides the foundation and SWT Designer adds the support for working with SWT based applications.

1.2. Using SWT Designer

SWT Designer provides a special editor. This editor can work with Eclipse 4 parts, SWT and JFace dialogs, JFace wizards, etc.

The following screenshot demonstrates what the editor looks like.

SWT Designer allows you to drag-and-drop SWT components into an existing layout. You can configure layout settings and create event handlers for your widgets.

SWT Designer contributes additional SWT and JFace templates to the Eclipse IDE. For example you can use it to create Composites and add these to the Eclipse user interface. To create a new Composite select File New Other… WindowBuilder SWT Designer SWT Composite.

SWT Designer has support to establish data binding via the JFace Data Binding framework.

2. Install SWT Designer

To use the SWT Designer for designing SWT user interfaces use Help Install New Software and enter the following update site to use it. https://download.eclipse.org/windowbuilder/latest/

The following WindowBuilder download site lists the available SWT designer releases. Typical the latest release is the best as the software is not actively enhanced so the latest release contains mainly bug fixes.

3. Exercise: Getting started with SWT Designer

3.1. Building a user interface

The following exercise assumes that you have SWT Designer already installed.

Right-click on your PlaygroundPart class and select Open With WindowBuilder Editor.

WindowBuilder uses the @PostConstruct method to identify that a class is an Eclipse part. This method needs to specify at least a Composite as parameter.

package com.vogella.tasks.ui.parts;

import jakarta.annotation.PostConstruct;

import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Composite;

public class PlaygroundPart {

    // the WindowBuilder / SWTDesigner tooling
    // uses the @PostConstruct method to figure out
    // that the class is an Eclipse 4 part

    // one method must be annotated with @PostConstruct and
    // must receive at least a SWT Composite


    @PostConstruct
    public void createControls(Composite parent) {
        System.out.println(this.getClass().getSimpleName()
        + " @PostConstruct method called.");
    }
}