I’ve been waiting for this. Eclipse announced the Visual Editor Projects to deliver a framework for GUI builders with reference implementations for SWT and Swing. There is a flash-based demo on how to create some simple visual classes in Swing. Looks like a nice, standard GUI builder. The overall benefits of GUI builders are debatable, but I think it is important for two reasons. The first is that GUI builders can certainly be helpful in prototyping UI design or creating mock screens even if it’s not used for production code. The other is that without a GUI builder Eclipse doubters can still point out that there current favorite IDE has one and therefore they can’t possibly switch (even though they could buy SWT-Designer today, but we’re all spoiled with free IDE tools).