🚀 go-pugleaf

Patrick W. McMichael wrote:
> Does Borland have any intention of supporting the SpringLayout in 
 > JBuilder's UI designer?  This is a valuable layout, especially in
 > terms of dealing with resizing issues.

For several versions jbuilder.jar has contained several 
SwingLayout-related classes that are not enabled.  My guess is that they 
intend to support it eventually but haven't yet figured out the right 
UI.  Having tried it myself once, I can say it's not an easy thing to 
create a usable interface for editing SpringLayout constraints.  There 
are almost more options than for GridBagLayout.

If you want to experiment (I make no assurances about what this may or 
may not break) you could try enabling it yourself.  Make a file whose 
contents are as shown below (two lines, 2nd line starts w/ a space). 
Create a JAR with this file as the manifest (jar cmf foo.txt foo.jar). 
Then put the JAR file in JBuilder's lib/ext directory and restart 
JBuilder.  You *might* have some kind of SpringLayout support after that.

OpenTools-Designer:
  com.borland.jbuilder.cmt2.designer.ui.SpringLayoutAssistant

-- 
Gillmer J. Derge [TeamB]

Ultimately, I'd envision a UI designer for SpringLayout that offered some Together-like functionality where "springs" were used as a type of link b/t components.  Add a "Spring Tool" to the UI pallette, where the link would be drawn as a "squiggly line" with hook points on the end.

The steps would go something like...

(1) Place the components on the UI almost as in flow-layout.

(2) Then, taking the Spring tool, establish links, hooking one end of the "spring" graphical icon to each of the two components to be addressed (two buttons, a label and a border of the enclosing container, etc.).  

(3) Once the spring-link was established, you could simply set the appropriate spacing b/t the hooked components.  The EAST, WEST, NORTH, SOUTH settings would be determined (by default at least) by the edge of each component the spring was "hooked to."

***

In the meanwhile, I'll have to try your workaround and see what happens to the UI designer.  Thanks!



"Gillmer J. Derge [TeamB]" <spam@gillmerderge.com> wrote:
>Patrick W. McMichael wrote:
>> Does Borland have any intention of supporting the SpringLayout in 
> > JBuilder's UI designer?  This is a valuable layout, especially in
> > terms of dealing with resizing issues.
>
>For several versions jbuilder.jar has contained several 
>SwingLayout-related classes that are not enabled.  My guess is that they 
>intend to support it eventually but haven't yet figured out the right 
>UI.  Having tried it myself once, I can say it's not an easy thing to 
>create a usable interface for editing SpringLayout constraints.  There 
>are almost more options than for GridBagLayout.
>
>If you want to experiment (I make no assurances about what this may or 
>may not break) you could try enabling it yourself.  Make a file whose 
>contents are as shown below (two lines, 2nd line starts w/ a space). 
>Create a JAR with this file as the manifest (jar cmf foo.txt foo.jar). 
>Then put the JAR file in JBuilder's lib/ext directory and restart 
>JBuilder.  You *might* have some kind of SpringLayout support after that.
>
>OpenTools-Designer:
>  com.borland.jbuilder.cmt2.designer.ui.SpringLayoutAssistant
>
>-- 
>Gillmer J. Derge [TeamB]

Patrick W. McMichael wrote:

> Ultimately, I'd envision a UI designer for SpringLayout that
> offered some Together-like functionality where "springs" were used
> as a type of link b/t components.  Add a "Spring Tool" to the UI
> pallette, where the link would be drawn as a "squiggly line" with
> hook points on the end.  [...]

Where and when have I seen that before ... oh, yeah.
In 1989, InterfaceBuilder, NeXT 0.98.  I still have
the documentation.

Looks like we're making progress everyday.


-- 


Paul Furbacher (TeamB)

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