GUI Layout Design...

[christy smile]

Hi, All,
I checked out Thomas Fly's website. It is pretty good There is a tutorial about GridBagLayout. I did not ues that layout in my GUI, I had a lot of panels on top of panels. Is this the right thing to do? I would like to have apoll to see how many people actually used the GridBagLayout, and how many did not, and how does that effect your final score.
Thank you.
Christy

[Thomas Fly]

Well thanx- I also used nested panels to a degree; the question is, does your application resize as a user would expect?
GridBagLayout is currently the most flexible layout (other layouts like CardLayout have their uses, of course), and it's not difficult either.
If you really want to understand layout managers, download a trial version of JBuilder, and go through the tutorial!

[Thomas Fly]

Originally posted by christy smile:
I checked out Thomas Fly's website.

(Actually, I have other stuff too
)

[John Sinues]

The GridBagLayout is a complex yet very flexible layout manager. In order to reduce the number of panels in my GUI, I chose to use it almost exclusively.
In addition to JBuilder, check out the netBeans IDE for building GUI's. It has a very good GridBagLayout tool and best of all it's *FREE*.
- John
[ October 05, 2002: Message edited by: John Sinues ]

[Thomas Fly]

Actually there are quite a few free IDE's; "Sun One" (formerly "Forte") Community Edition is free, and is in fact based upon NetBeans (and is ssssssllllllllllooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww compared to the $9.95 on CD JBuilder Personal); Oracle JDeveloper (based upon JBuilder actually) has a free version I believe; IBM VisualAge has a free version; BlueJ; and IntelliJ IDEA...

[Pete Lyons]

I didn't use GridBagLayout. I used mostly BoxLayout, FlowLayout, and BorderLayout, and was able to get pretty good resize behavior. It handles everything except being made extremely narrow (in which case widgets just disappear, but when the total area of the window is less than the total area of the minimum size of the widgets, there's not much you can do anyway). I remember reading articles suggesting saving GridBagLayout for when it is absolutely necessary due to it's relative complexity, and that you can get correct behavior with the right combinations of the simpler layouts.

[Thomas Fly]

When you do it as demonstrated in the JBuilder tutorial, GridBagLayout is surprisingly easy...

[christy smile]

Hi, All,
Thank you for the input... I am going to go through the tutorial for the GridBagLayout then change some more code

[Thomas Fly]

Why the ? The whole point is to learn how to be a good developer, right?- even if it's a long, bumpy road (I think the Beatles even wrote a song about it; The Long and Bumpy Road)...

[Ian Hamilton]

http://info.borland.com/techpubs/jbuilder/jbuilder9/designui/gridbaglayout/intro.html

THe JBuilder gridbaglayout demo is here. No need to download JBuilder

[Manuel Comnenus]

If you have a requirement for WSYSIWYG printing, you need to verify that your nested panel scenario will print well. Regarding JBuilder, it is a great product and I have it. However, you might want to learn what you can about its future before you invest a lot of time with it. Borland is spinning its IDE business off into a separate company. Borland also plans to, I understand, offer some kind of JBuilder plug-in for Eclipse. Now, that is an idea that I really find baffling. You also have to decide if you are willing to accept the way in which JBuilder, like any GUI builder, structures the GUI code - do you like it and, more importantly, is it something that you are comfortable submitting for your project.

Steve