Writing code manually to create a GUI application is no less than a nightmare for any developer. These days almost all development IDEs come packaged with a GUI builder. NetBeans IDE too provides you with a GUI builder for Java applications called 'Matisse.' Why is Matisse so special? you may ask. To understand this let's look at what has been used for building GUIs till now. Swing and AWT are two main Java libraries that are used for building UIs for desktop applications.


Most IDEs support various Swing layout managers for designing the user interface, but the limitation with them has been that their UI view is different from the WYSIWYG view. With Matisse, NetBeans introduced a new layout manager called 'GroupLayout.' Though this new layout manager is not a part of Swing, it can be freely distributed with the applications that you build with NetBeans.