DesignGridLayout is a Swing LayoutManager, revolutionary by its API, simple but powerful. Its main advantages are:
- Good looking forms (alignment, spacing, sizing, visual balance): this is entirely taken over by DesignGridLayout itself without any special hint from the developer
- Reduced learning curve for developers, thanks to its fluent API which is simple, effective, compile-safe and IDE code-completion friendly
- No graphics designer needed: the API is the graphical designer
- Readability and maintainability: you can literally "visualize" the layout by browsing the code that sets it up; inserting a new row of components is done by simply inserting a new line of code in the layout setup code...
- Free: the project is open source and released under Apache License 2.0
This version brings the following improvements:
- #13: support for multiple groups of fields, each with its own label column
- #5: smart vertical resize: DesignGridLayout automatically determines which rows should grow vertically and also make sure that components height is suitable to display an entire line of information (useful for JList, JTable, JTextArea)
- #18: smarter horizontal resize behavior: now DesignGridLayout won't resize components under their minimum size
- #9: automatic support of right-to-left text orientation based on Locale
- #16: smarter gaps for empty rows
- #15: resolution independence
- #20: fixed ugly layout problem when container has a border
- #12: now setLayout() is automatically called by DesignGridLayout constructor
I consider the current version ready for production as the current test suite of DesignGridLayout is quite comprehensive and covers all its features.
However, I have decided to prepare a release candidate to give myself a chance to fix any problems that users may find but that I could not discover by myself (in particular, problems related to platforms that I don't have: MacOS-X, Linux, Solaris).
If needed, I will create further release candidates. I will wait about one month after a rc until I cut a final release.
What's next?
- first of all, I'll get some rest;-)
- then I'll spend some weeks on my other open source project, guice-gui
- finally I'll start working on DesignGridLayout V1.1, which should include just one improvement (issue #10: support for components spanning several rows) which should be released as a Christmas present;-)
Posts
Erratum: 1.0-rc2 has been released today!
ReplyDeleteAfter a few days work with Guice-GUI (which has some support for DesignGridLayout), I found 3 little bugs (issues #22, #23, #24) in some special -uncommon- uses of GridBagLayout.
Hence I decided to cut a new release candidate immediately after fixing these 3 issues.
New Erratum: 1.0-rc3 just released!
ReplyDeleteA spurious bug (issue #25) I had never caught before has been fixed: in previous version, calling pack() twice on the JDialog or JFrame would remove the gap used for emptyRow().
Since many GUI framework tend to reuse JPanels over different JDialog, and call pack() every time, I had to fix this issue with top priority.
I believe that should be the last issue before final release (by end of November, then).