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Re: Layout Managers



GridBag is one of few choices if you want your gui components to stretch and shrink proportionally to the screen when it gets resized.  You have a couple options.
 
1.  Use null layout or XYLayout using JDeveloper or JBuilder, then switch to GridBag when your done.  My experience is that if you have a ton of components on a screen that you spent hours trying to get line everthing up, then switching to GridBag hoses everything up and looks terrible.  But if you have just a dozen or so components, you will be fine.
 
2.  Forte (Sun One Studio)  has a grid layout manager that I have not used extensively, but it looks promising.  I played around with it a few months back.  I cannot remember the name of it.  It behaves like GridBag, but much easier to deal with, ie, stretches w/ a screen resize.
 
Personally, I can't stand GridBag layout because I always have too many components to deal with.  It is a pain in the "you know what" if you have tons of components.  I prefer the XYLayout from JDeveloper.  It does not resize with your screen, but when I get done prototyping, the finished product looks great, and my frustration level is near zero.
 
Kent.
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, November 10, 2002 5:54 PM
Subject: Layout Managers

I'm looking for a good layout manager. I've evaluated XmFormLayout, AttachLayout, HTMLLayout, TableLayout & GridBag.  I'm working on a project that is going to be presented in several languages so localization is an issue. I've found GridBag to work well but I feel it's somewhat cumbersome to utilize.  The XmFormLayout manager is relational in nature as opposed to the grid layout concept and it's easy to use.  However, it is not very "feature rich", it's older so I had to remove all of the deprecated method calls to get it to work with Swing. It falls short of my needs. I need a quick and efficient way to create resizable screens that support internationalization.  Any comments would be appreciated.
 
Regards,
Tony Schoenbachler