Burp Suite Plugin UI Rapid Design

Burp Suite Plugin UI Quick Design#

Introduction#

There is no detailed article online on how to quickly design a Burp Suite UI interface. Most of the information available is about using other authors' plugin UIs as templates or using the built-in GUI tool in IDEA, which is extremely difficult to use. This discourages people who want to develop plugins but are not familiar with Swing. Now, based on my own experience in plugin development, I will introduce how to use the NetBeans IDE tool to quickly design the desired UI interface.

Tools Used#

IntelliJ IDEA
NetBeans IDE

Usage of NetBeans IDE#

I won't go into the installation process, you can directly download and install it from the official website (it's ready to use, no registration required).

Basic Usage#

Start by creating a new project. Here, I will create a Maven project (the type of project doesn't matter), and simply click "Next" to complete the process.

This will create a project with a default "Hello World" class.

In the project, create a new "JPanel Form" window. The Burp Suite UI is based on JPanel design.

Give it a name of your choice.

This will give you a user interface like this, making it very convenient to proceed.

Drag and drop the controls from the right side to the panel and design the interface according to your preferences. You can preview it in real-time by clicking here.

Points to Note#

If you are familiar with Swing, you should be very familiar with this interface, which corresponds to the properties of each control.

Pay attention to modifying the properties (name, modifiers) of the controls. Change the name to something easy to remember and set the control to "public" according to your needs, making it easier to access the control in the code.

Generate the listener methods in advance if you need to implement certain functionality when a control is clicked. In NetBeans IDE, simply double-click the corresponding control to automatically create the listener method, saving you from writing the code yourself.

Exporting UI Code#

If you are not comfortable with using NetBeans IDE (due to the language barrier), you can go back to IDEA to write our code. To do this, you need to export the UI code from NetBeans IDE and paste it into IDEA. It's actually very simple, just copy the code.

Click on the "Source" option to view the source code of our UI. Copy it all and paste it into IDEA.

Testing and Writing UI Code in IDEA#

Since the UI we designed earlier is a JPanel, we need to wrap it in a JFrame.

package UI;

import javax.swing.*;

public class MainClass {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(() -> {
            JFrame frame = new JFrame("Test Application");
            frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);

            burpTestUI panel = new burpTestUI();
            frame.add(panel);

            frame.pack();
            frame.setVisible(true);
        });
    }
}

This way, you can test the UI code in IDEA.

Implementing the ITab Interface in Burp Suite#

Implement the ITab interface and return an instance of the UI class in the getUiComponent() method, then register the SuiteTab.

Packaging

I won't go into how to package it, as there are many articles available online.

Conclusion#

In summary, using NetBeans IDE to design a Burp Suite UI is very convenient.