Hi Justin, thanks for your question, but I think you may want to re-post it somewhere more specific to your task. This forum is focused on the Alfresco document management platform. You'll find plenty of people with opinions about development tools, but your question does not seem to be about Alfresco.
If you are trying to build a Swing app with Netbeans using the Java GUI builder that will be used as a front-end to Alfresco, of course, you can do that with any tool you choose. Probably it would make the most sense to do that using CMIS and/or the Alfresco public REST API to remotely communicate with Alfresco via HTTP.
An alternative would be to embed Alfresco within your thick-client app, but very few people are really doing that these days.
