[DanielRibeiro]

Even in java ecosystem, there are several tools that make gui desing easier: Swing builder in groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org/Swing+Builder), Scala Swing Dsl (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1570175/scala-and-swing-g...), Cheri for jruby (http://objectmix.com/ruby/251973-cheri-builder-style-jruby-s...), and the list goes on.

But it's good to see the effort on Java as well, which can do DSLs as well, even those these are easier on languages that actively support them, such as scala, groovy, ruby, clojure, ...

[jamesbritt]

I seriously do not understand why people don't just use the free GUI builder that comes with Netbeans, then wire up the resulting classes.

And wiring them up doesn't get any easier than using JRuby with Monkeybars (http://monkeybars.org). Yes, I'm biased, I'm the project leader. But still. :)

DSLs and such are nice for smallish UIs, but once you get to anything remotely sophisticated tweaking text files to sort out alignment, flow, balance, etc. is crazy. (And double crazy if those text files are XML.)

[DanielRibeiro]

Great link. I knew monkeybars once, but totally forgo about it. It seems complement swing with what glade does to gtk (and its code generators do, from taking xml and turning into python/ruby/perl,etc files).