There is a free trial download; that makes a very good Java demo :-)

With Flash, which most people can view, we can have the voiceover and
show off certain features which otherwise might be overlooked,
especially in such a concise amount of time. For a longer look, there
is the trial download of the product.

http://www.computersinmotion.com

--
Cheers, Graham Perks.

Sounds like the design wasn't thought out up front.  And the code was
poorly written if you have to 'figure out' where to modify it.

They don't.  GBL isn't about components in rows and columns.  The grid
represents areas of the available space.  Some components fit nicely
into a single cell of the grid.  Others span one or more cells both
horizontally and vertically.  Components can be aligned in a variety of
ways to the edges of the cells.  It's really not that difficult.

I've rarely fought with it in the past.

Jim S.

GridBagLayout defines its grid while filling it;
that seems to make these layouts harder to understand.
The last component added can change the whole grid.
Hence you have to read a GridBagLayout builder code
completely to build a mental layout - similar to an
interpreter you've to read every constraints object
and add it to the current state.

In my layout courses I've found that developers could
work faster with the TableLayout. Unlike GBL, the
TableLayout allows to define the grid first, then you
add the components.

If you can define the grid, or more generally, the
big structure, statically, you have fixed 'mental costs'
for understanding it. With a dynamically defined grid
the mental costs are linear with the number of components.

Although they are often invisible, developers talk about
rows and columns. And let developers lay out an editor
with a leading label column and 5 rows for ...
Can you see the rows? But do you see how natural it is
to describe a form with columns and rows.
Back to the developer: let him lay out the editor and
let her paint a draft on a paper. Guess how many people
draw a grid before they start filling it?

For quite a long time grids have been an effective means
to describe readable layouts. In 1470 some monks in Paris
have set up a style guide for how to use the brand new
Gutenberg technique. Basically they found a grid useful
with a set of equally sized lines (or rows) where glyphs
are aligned along an invisible line, what we call today
the font baseline.

In the traditional print media industry, grids help designers
save time and money. More than that, grid systems help a team
focus on content, not structure - while ensuring consistency.
(In a well crafted book both sides of the paper are aligned
in this way, so that you can read the words quickly even
if the light shines through the paper.)

You can find good introductions about grids and grid systems
in the work of Jan Tschichold, Josef Mueller-Brockmann or
Ruedi Ruegg. Kevin Mullet and Darrel Sano present a layout
system for widget toolkits that is based on grid systems or,
in their wording, design modules.

Hope this helps,
Karsten Lentzsch
JGoodies :: Java User Interface Design

can you understand such generated code?
It is horrible - jLabel35, jTextField97, jComboBox11 - and unmaintable, cos
you need hours to understand and refactor it.

____________

http://reader.imagero.com the best java image reader.

That's a popular fallacy.

GridBagLayout cannot implement a bunch of essential
screen design tasks. I provide several examples in
presentations and in a live demo that you can't do
with the GridBagLayout - with or without IDE designer.

Simple things:
o Build a panel with two JLists, both equally sized.
o Build a form with three rows, each with equal height,
  even if you mix a text field, button, or combo.
o Build a symmetric panel.
o Build two panels for use in a tabbed pane that do
  not 'jump' to the left and right if you switch tabs.
o Build a panel with an OK button that has a well
  designed minimum size, let's say 50 dialog units.

Hard stuff:
o Build a button bar with OK, Cancel that ensures
  minimum widths as required by the MS layout style
  and that uses the logical gap for related components.
o Build a button bar with OK, Cancel, Apply that honors
  the platform button order: left-to-right vs. right-to-left.
o Build a panel with label and text field,
  font baselines aligned.
o Build a panel with label, text field and button,
  font baselines aligned, perceived bounds centered.

Actually, GridBagLayout can do all of the above
if you use a fixed font, fixed font size, fixed
rasterizer, fixed screen resolution, and fixed l&f
 - but then a null-layout would be simpler.

GridBagLayout does not retain _proportions_ if you
change the font, font size, or screen resolution,
since it has no means to describe non-pixel sizes.
GridBagLayout cannot ensure that two columns/rows
get the same size. GridBagLayout cannot ensure a
non-pixel minimum size.

You can see most of the above examples in this presentation:
http://www.jgoodies.com/articles/layout-essentials.pdf
Here are everyday layout tasks, some impossible for GBL:
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/formsdemo/
A more thorough discussion of Java layout problems
is available in the following whitepaper:
http://www.jgoodies.com/articles/forms.pdf

Best regards,
Karsten