🚀 go-pugleaf

This is a question about a proper application development. I.e a 
multi-screen, menu and button driven app that changes the contents of 
the window that the user sees based on actions and context.

A normal app seems to me to have a frame and then areas that are 
refreshed with various jpanels depending on what the "screen" is. For 
example going from a login screen to a data display screen.

There seems to be several ways to achieve this:
   a) Use cardlayout and change visibility to bring the required card 
"screen" to the foreground.
   b) Layer panels on top of each other and change their visibility.
   c) Invoke new frames and exit old ones.
   d) create and drop jpanel objects and position these on the screen.

Card layout (a): For large apps that have many screens, using cardlayout 
to change from screen to screen causes memory overflows and the app 
chews large amounts of memory and is slow to load.

Layers (b): This requires null or XY layout and is decidedly 
non-resizable! It has all sorts of problems not least of which is that 
you quickly confuse JBuilder and lose nearly all the visual design and 
layout ability.

Creating new frames (c): This is a terrible solution because you are 
essentially restarting the app every time and reloading loads of things 
(such as menus) that shouldn't have to be reloaded.

Creating/dropping objects (d): This seems the best of the bad choices 
but means that you quickly lose JBuilder's visual designing because it 
cannot understand the code. Also requires a lot of coding for what is 
really a fairly straight forward and dare I say probably well 
established and solved problem.


I keep thinking that I am missing a trick with JBuilder X but I have 
looked and looked in the manual and cannot find anything that solves 
this problem. This is at start as far as any app dev is concerned and 
given how mature JB is now, should have been solved in JB ages ago.

So what am I missing? What is the best solution to this problem? Anyone 
have any tips or ideas for me?