I downloaded Visual Swing and tried to get it running. So far I've used
the VE, but I have some trouble with it, so I was happy and thankful to
find a possible alternative.
I tried to load some of my VE generated GUIs (applications and components)
into Visual Swing. This didn't work for at least two reasons:
When VE creates an application, it generates a class extending Object with
the app's main JFrame as a member. Visual Swing won't open those, because
it thinks it is not a swing class (which it isn't, but...)
Most of my Swing classes won't open in Visual Swing as well. The reason is
that the VE creates lazy loading methods for all GUI elements except for
JLabels. Visual Swing wants a lazy loading method for those too and
insists on me writing one for each label.
So I failed to open my existing project in Visual Swing, and up to now I
don't want to refactor them all.
Also, it seemed to me that Eclipse crashed several times because both VE
and Visual Swing were installed (or open), but I didn't look deeper.
I haven't tried to create a new GUI with Visual Swing so far. Maybe that
works better, but right now I don't have the time.