Sophisticated Layout Management

We have managed to lay out the user interface components of our sample applications so far by using only the border layout, flow layout, and grid layout. For more complex tasks, this is not going to be enough. In this section, we discuss advanced layout management in detail.

Windows programmers may well wonder why Java makes so much fuss about layout managers. After all, in Windows, layout management is not a big deal: First, you use a dialog editor to drag and drop your components onto the surface of a dialog, and then you use editor tools to line up components, to space them equally, to center them, and so on. If you are working on a big project, you probably don’t have to worry about component layout at all—a skilled user interface designer does all this for you.