Layout with 2 components on oposite sides of JFrame

Question

Hello all,
I feel like I'm missing something really obvious, but I've been trying to layout a JPanel which extends the whole width of my JFrame and contains a button on either side. i.e.
left frame edge-> | |button| <empty space here> |button| | <-right frame edge
I'm pretty sure I could pull this off with SpringLayout, but I need to support Java 1.3.1 in this app.
I'm also pretty sure that I could do something like this:
JPanel leftSide = new JPanel( new FlowLayout( FlowLayout.LEFT ) );
leftSide.add(new JButton("left") );
JPanel rightSide = new JPanel( new FlowLayout( FlowLayout.RIGHT ) );
rightSide.add(new JButton("right") );
CustomSizeAwarePanel magic = new CustomSizeAwarePanel( parentComponent, new BorderLayout() );
magic.add( leftSide, BorderLayout.WEST );
magic.add( leftSide, BorderLayout.EAST );where CustomSizeAwarePanel is aware of the parent Components width and resizes itself appropriately.
... but I have the nagging feeling that there is an easier way to do this.
thanks all,
Steven

Answer 1

Thanks for the thoughts!
I have used GridBag extensively in the past and didn't even consider that it would do what I was looking for. Ironically enough, I even have my GridBagHelper classes laying around which could make this a little easier. :)
I was just typing in psuedo code and fouled up by not specifying the right button. The problem I was having with Border Layout was that the parent component (holding the two buttons) would resize itself to be as small as possible, squishing the two buttons in the middle of the screen. I played around with putting an extremely large component in the BorderLayout.CENTER, but that did not size correctly.
What I ended up with was implementing the 'magic' class that resized itself to the parent components width and the child components height. This seems to be working well, but if anyone sees issues....
Anyway, The code is worth a thousand words...
//simple calling code
     JPanel customPanel = buildCustomByPanel();
     //You need to pass in the tallest component as the child
     ParentWidthComponent northCentralPanel = new ParentWidthComponent( this.getContentPane(), customPanel, new BorderLayout());
     northCentralPanel.add( customPanel, BorderLayout.WEST );
     northCentralPanel.add( viewOtherAttrCheck, BorderLayout.EAST );
     centerPanel.add( BorderLayout.NORTH, northCentralPanel );
//class code
import java.awt.Container;
import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import javax.swing.JComponent;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
public class ParentWidthComponent extends JPanel {
     protected Container parent;
     protected JComponent child;
     public ParentWidthComponent ( Container componentWidth, JComponent componentHeight ) {
          super();
          parent = componentWidth;
          child = componentHeight;
     public ParentWidthComponent (  Container componentWidth, JComponent componentHeight, BorderLayout manager ) {
          super(manager);
          parent = componentWidth;
          child = componentHeight;
     public Dimension getPreferredSize () {
          return  new Dimension( (int)parent.getSize().getWidth(), (int)child.getPreferredSize().getHeight() );
     }Thanks again for the suggestions.
-Steven