🚀 go-pugleaf

Tony wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I wonder if anybody would care to share your view on the XY layout and how 
> appropriate
> it is to use it in business GUI applications. From time to time I notice 
> people say that it is
> not appropriate to use it. For some time I have successfully employed the 
> following approach
> for our GUI applications and found it both fast, simple, _predictable_ and 
> aesthetically pleasing:
> 
> - Main window has a fixed size for which the business application is 
> designed (normally based on
>   the lowest supported resolution)
> - Forms that are visualized on the main window and forms that appear in 
> dialogs all use XYLayout
>    with alignment, sizing and positioning done in JBuilder designer.
> 
> I have found that Layout managers do very little to help application 
> programmers when it comes
> to forms layout. As a rule there IS always a minimum resolution with 
> anything lower than minimum
> not making sense and no layout manager in the world can fix that. For 
> resolutions higher than what
> the application was desined for in the best case you end up with huge empty 
> spaces which normally
> look ugly and can get in the way of functional design.
> 
> I am not trying to say that one can not design good UI with the proper usage 
> of Layout managers,
> my point is that it takes a lot of effort to do that and the end result in 
> my opinion is not worth it.
> 
> Tony.
> 
> 
> 

One thing you need to consider is the target audience for your 
application.  You need to come up with REQUIREMENTS that match your 
target audience.  And you can hope that this will let you limit one or 
more of the display variables, so that you don't have to make sure that 
your application looks as good at 1600x1200 as it does at 800x600, and 
that every window and dialog is completely flexible and resizeable. 
Nailing down those requirements up front will save you a lot of grief at 
design time.

Long before Java existed, I worked on cross-platform GUI development 
tools in C... and I can tell you that layout problems pre-date Java by 
quite a bit.

Layout for applications that need to work on screens of varying 
resolution, with user-customizable font sizes, is a *nightmare*.

Layout Managers in Java attempt to help you solve problems in layout. 
And they don't all help you solve the same problem.  You should know 
exactly what problem each layout manager is designed to solve.  You 
should break your complex dialogs down into separate panels, and let 
each panel use the layout manager which is most appropriate.

Something like XYLayout solves the problem of "need to throw something 
together quickly that looks good".  I'd use it for prototyping, but not 
a lot else.  As soon as you change any of the display variables, 
resolution, font size, aspect ratio, XYLayout will break.  That's why 
most of us keep harping about not using it.

The hands-down winner for flexibility in layout managers is 
GridBagLayout.  But you have to sit down with it and learn it properly. 
  All that flexibility means that it's very difficult to start, but once 
you "become one" with it, you will find it possible to layout anything 
very quickly.  And GridBag is one of the layout managers that solves the 
"needs to be resizable" problem very effectively.

I think it is worth the effort to learn the proper usages of all the 
layout managers, and then to use them appropriately.  If you don't do 
that learning, then using layout managers will always be a frustrating 
experience.

-- 

Regards,

Lori Olson [TeamB]

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