one of the most notorious of the layout managers in Java
in fact for many developers it symbolizes the failure of the layout manager concept. That is the main reason why we never added it.
Last week I had a very interesting conversation with a very prominent Swing developer
and he asked me whether we had gridbag support. I answered that we do not and repeated the regular “no one likes it” line, turns out he does like it and has a lot of Swing code that uses GridBag!
Interesting…
Porting a Swing/AWT layout manager to Codename One is pretty close to trivial, there are very few things you need to actually change.
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Codename One doesn’t have Insets, I added some support for them in order to port gridbag but components in Codename One have a Margin they need to consider instead of the insets (the padding is in the preferred size).
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AWT layout managers also synchronize a lot on the AWT thread. This is no longer necessary since Codename One is single threaded like Swing.
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Components are positioned relatively to container so the layout code can start at 0, 0 (otherwise it will be slightly offset).
Other than those things its mostly just fixing method signatures and import statements which are slightly different. Pretty trivial stuff and GridBagLayout from project Harmony is now working on Codename One.
So to show this off I
took this code from the Java tutorial
and ported it to Codename One, pretty easy stuff:
Now this stuff probably won’t make it into the GUI builder in the forseeable future, but if you are hellbent on GridBag or porting some Swing code this should be pretty convenient. Its also a great case study if you want to port some of your other favorite layout managers such as MiG or FormLayout.
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2 Comments
I agree that GridBagLayout was hell to configure by hand, however I learned to like it more since the NetBeans team created their fancy customizer a few years ago… I wonder how easy/hard it would be to reuse it in CN1’s own designer ?
Yeah, I used gridbag a lot. It might be painful, but sometimes it was the best thing to do. I tried some of the other replacements and they were even more difficult and were not hand modifiable.