Swing Layout Managers

Broadly speaking there are three sorts of layout managers - those that require an extensive knowledge of the finer details of swing and UI design - for example the classic GridBagLayout; those that attempt to offer a finer layout experience, but at the expense of complexity - the JGoodies libraries fall within this space; and those that make it easy for the rest of us to put together a UI and rapidly. This last category is interesting and provides a workable alternative to GUI builders such as Netbeans' Matisse.

Some time ago I discovered RiverLayout, and was able to put it to good use in small parts of a larger commercial UI. However, more recently, I discovered a much more full featured layout, similar in nature, but much more capable of producing sophisticated, yet simple and maintainable UI forms. This is MigLayout. This is an interesting toolkit, easy but powerful.

It seems that simple declarative views, loosely coupled to application logic by the mechanism of binding beans seems to be the direction in which UIs are turning. Therefore, in web UIs we have the standard of JSF, challenged by frameworks such as Wicket. In rich client UIs we have XUL,  JavaFX, and the Lightweight UI Toolkit (for mobile devices). A number of open source declarative frameworks exist, and of course Microsoft have their XAML initiative, which makes clear that these new directions are not restricted to Java.These trends seem finally to open up the practical possibility of rapid Java GUI development.