Use IntelliJ's Swing Designer in Maven

Just a configuration that enables using IntelliJ's Swing in Maven

HSGamer included in category Development

2023-10-24 2024-01-23 325 words 2 minutes

Recently, I’ve been working on several projects related to Java Swing and Maven, so I tried many tools from popular IDEs to create the Forms & Dialogs.

My favorite was IntelliJ’s Swing Designer because:

I mainly use IntelliJ in most of my projects
The editor is pretty clean and not too bloated for my workspace
The structure has clear separation between code and design (Only provide components variables when needed)

However, the biggest problem was that there was no clear & official tool or tutorial to integrate the forms into my Maven projects.

Then, I found a blog from Tobias Manske on the configuration. You can check it here.

It worked in my case, but I had to run the forms in IntelliJ to get them compiled before running the Maven actions. It means that I still couldn’t use it in a continuous integration (CI) like Github Actions.

So then I dug around the Ant plugin. Finally, it works perfectly now.

Here is my minimal configuration:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>me.hsgamer</groupId>
    <artifactId>example</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>

    <properties>
        <intellij.version>232.9921.53</intellij.version>
    </properties>

    <repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>jetbrains.releases</id>
            <url>https://www.jetbrains.com/intellij-repository/releases</url>
        </repository>
        <repository>
            <id>jetbrains.3rdparty</id>
            <url>https://cache-redirector.jetbrains.com/intellij-dependencies</url>
        </repository>
    </repositories>

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>3.0.0</version>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <phase>compile</phase>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>run</goal>
                        </goals>
                        <configuration>
                            <target>
                                <property name="build.compiler" value="extJavac"/>
                                <path id="j2sp">
                                    <pathelement location="${project.basedir}/src/main/java"/>
                                </path>
                                <taskdef name="javac2" classpathref="maven.compile.classpath" classname="com.intellij.ant.Javac2"/>
                                <javac2 destdir="${project.basedir}/target/classes">
                                    <src refid="j2sp"/>
                                    <classpath>
                                        <path refid="maven.plugin.classpath"/>
                                        <path refid="maven.compile.classpath"/>
                                        <path refid="maven.runtime.classpath"/>
                                    </classpath>
                                </javac2>
                            </target>
                        </configuration>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.jetbrains.intellij.java</groupId>
            <artifactId>java-gui-forms-rt</artifactId>
            <version>${intellij.version}</version>
            <scope>compile</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.jetbrains.intellij.java</groupId>
            <artifactId>java-compiler-ant-tasks</artifactId>
            <version>${intellij.version}</version>
            <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</project>