Best practice or good pattern for developing complex swing UI

Question

When I develop some a bit complex swing UI which maybe contain many labels, fields etc. my code becomes massive. Especially when I use GridbagLayout, when there are many components on a panel, if I want to add or remove or change one component's position sometimes I need to modify many x, y to adjust. Are there any good pattern or solution for dealing with this? Should I write my own layout? Or to find a UI designer Plugin in eclipse (but I feel the codes generated by designer are usually hard to maintain)? Thanks.

Answer 1

I've recently been working with GridBagLayout. My current solution for working with this layout is to, whenever possible, create a panel builder class that builds the panel. This only works well, however, if your panel layout can be described in a generic fashion.
For example, I have a particular layout I want to use that consists of headers that can span the entire width of a panel with sections between the headers that consist of two roughly centered columns such that each section has the same center line between the columns. I can accomplish this with GridBagLayout. So I wrote a panel builder with methods addHeader(Component) and addRow(leftComponent, rightComponent), a few other helper methods, and behind the scenes, it prepares it all using a GridBagLayout.
Sort of like this:
MyPanelBuilder builder = new MyPanelBuilder();
builder.addHeading("Section 1");
builder.addRow(fooPanel, barPanel);
builder.addHeading("Section 2");
builder.addRow(aPanel, bPanel);
builder.addRow(cPanel, dPanel);
JPanel myPanel = builder.build();Behind the scenes, the panel builder keeps a list of everything it needs to add to the panel. Then when build is called, it lays it all out in a panel using GridBagLayout and returns it.
As for extending JFrame for your main application frame and JPanel for specific purpose application panels, I'm still not convinced it's a bad idea.