Netbean’s Matisse GUI builder has made a huge difference in the effort required to build a Swing app – with Netbeans 5.0 now it is possible to build good looking Swing apps with minimal effort.
But what about wiring together actual code with your new GUI front end? Michael Santos has an interesting blog entry on java.net about a project called Genesis that allows you to use annotations to wire up your code to your Swing code. The examples in the article look very simple – this is an approach we should keep our eyes on.