[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).