New OSS project responsibility!

About one month ago, I have been assigned owner of the DesignGridLayout project.
I was very happy for that because:

1. I like this project a lot (since the first time I knew it, in November 2007)
2. But it seemed to have been dormant for more than one year

Most of the few issues open on the project were posted by me, hence I had to fix them by myself in the past.

Recently, I thought about completely refactoring DesignGridLayout source code, which I did, in order to improve its API furthermore and make it easier to enhance later on.

Since I have several improvement ideas, I have then contacted the curren project owner to ask him if he was interested in my work. His answer was that unfortunately he is much too busy to keep the project living and thus he suggested that I could become owner of the project and keep it alive! That's how it all happened!

From then on, I have started to take hold of the project and suggest important changes:

• more open license (GPL currently)
• upload to maven2 repository
• switching from CVS to Subversion
• API improvements

I truly believe that DesignGridLayout is a revolutionary LayoutManager for Swing applications but unfortunately, there was not much advertising about it so far.

If you are fed up of standard Swing layouts (GridBagLayout in particular;-)) and you find 3rd party OSS layouts a bit steep to learn, then you should definately take a look at DesignGridLayout, it is worth your (little) time!

I'll blog more about DesignGridLayout soon after I have released a new version including the whole refactored source code.