GUIs in Java

I might not be the first one to mention this and I'm certainly not going to be the last one, but creating a user-interface in Java can be a pain in the you-know-what.
Swing is a rather unintelligible API to begin with. Coding every single line from scratch is tedious and annoying, especially so if the result looks nothing like you intended.

I'm usually more of a .NET guy to begin with, so I'm used to a drag-and-drop UI-Designer and a XAML-parser that takes some of the coding work off my hands.
Creating a Layout that stays the same once you resize the window is a ton easier, too.

Unfortunately, the curriculum of my computer science class pretty much forces me to use Java for every app I create.At first I figured that I was the one to blame for a malfunctioning GUI, but after digging deeper and searching Google for answers I quickly realized that I wasn't the only one having problems getting my head around Swing. The different Layout Managers have their quirks and hard-coding every single value is obviously not an option. Generally speaking, the level of frustration is a lot higher than it would need to be. I recently stumbled across some ingenious IDEs that include some very sophisticated and easy-to-use GUI-Designers.
We'll see how that's going to work out for me. It's safe to say that it's going to be a lot less frustrating than coding everything from scratch.