It appears that every once in a while, makers of really good software remember that there are projects out there who could have used their software, if only they had the resources. Instantiations has very kindly donated a licence for their WindowBuilder Pro product for Opereffa, and I am more than happy to have access to their excellent tool. For those who have not heard about them Instantiations is a company which produces great tools for software developers. Especially if you are using Eclipse, and you are developing desktop or GWT based web applications, their WindowBuilder Pro is pretty much the best tool that money can buy. WindowBuilder Pro does only let you create SWT and Swing forms, but it also lets you create SWT gui artefacts which are crucial in Eclipse plugins. Developing views and editors using WindowBuilder Pro is much easier compared to hand coding them, and guess what: we have lots of tooling to do around Opereffa’s Eclipse plugins.

Simply by filling in a form you can ask for a licence donation for your open source project, and if you are granted one like us, then you can enjoy really good tooling. Since WindowBuilder Pro does not generate any unusual artefacts, you can easily distribute your source code without any dependencies to propriatry resources or libraries. What more can you ask for?