IDE's and LayoutManagers

Question

I have a question regarding the practicability of using LayoutManagers in the realworld. Since most of the apps so far mostly required me to use components like tables or trees which spanned pretty much the entire UI, I never really used Layout Managers other than BorderLayout extensively. Interaction with other layout managers was mostly limited to trying out stuff but my first reaction was they are just clumsy and not worth the effort.
So my question is how practical do you find using layout managers compared to not using one at all ( using a null layout and then placing (and sizing) components yourself, as done in Powerbuilder/VB/Delphi enviroments.
That brings me to the next question - are there any good IDE's which support this feature. Forte from Sun has an "AbsoluteLayout" that does this but I find it too slow. Can anybody have comments on doing this using other IDE's like
Visual Cafe
JBuilder
Visual Age for Java
Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

Hi klowtherjr,
Thanks for your feedback. Reason for asking me the question was I come from a PowerBuilder background, and when you create a screen, there is no Layout Manager involved, you just drop your controls, textboxes, buttons, etc, and lay them out on the screen as you want them. There was never any problem with this approach, if you need to make changes, you go to the window painter add/remove the components you want, move some around, recompile the code. If the user changes screen resolution, the components size themselves, and I agree that in some instances if the original screen was created to use a very fine resolution, then some of the components will be outside the screen boundries, but this can be avoided by using a denominator like 640x480 for any application. But all windows applications whether in PowerBuilder, Visual Basic or VC++ are written this way, and everybody is pretty comfortable using them. Same applies to FORM's in browsers, where the limited components available in the FORM tag are laid out as designed, regardless of the size of the browser.
As for the case of using layout manangers, let me give an example where I created a small popup window which asks the user to log in. I created a simple gui using a grid (3,2) layout with the following
Label ("UserName"), TextField,
Label ("Password"), PasswordField,
Button (OK), Button(Cancel).
Its a small window, so I select its initial size to be 300x200 so that all the above components look nicely laid out, proportional, and the size that we normally see all our buttons and textfields. So good so far. Now the user decides to make this window bigger, and now those components that we now have suddenly look odd sized. I have giant buttons with the original font, I have giant textfields with the cursor size the original textfield, just looks so odd. We don't expect buttons and textboxes resized to fit the screen, but then other components might be OK (e.g. TextArea). I have used the BorderLayout in some instances and just found it tedious to go on placing Panels within each region and felt that such screens would be far more complex to maintain because you have to deal with the layout manager of the parent frame, the panel, if you add one, the panel withing the north region of this and so on.
Maybe I am missing something - I am aware the the GridBagLayout is the most flexible - and most complex layout manager, but am not super keen to try it, given the experiences with the above Layout Managers that I used. So what I really need to know if there was anybody else who feels the same restrictions that I do, but if everyone else feels comfortable using the layout managers in the API, then maybe I should just do the same withot really worrying about the issues I mentioned.