The Vertical FlowLayout that doesn't Exist?

Question

Ok, I've looked through the forum, and checked on a popular search engine, and it seems to me that there is no such thing as a vertically oriented FlowLayout. But why not? Is it difficult/impossible to implement? Please, someone, explain.
Some suggested solutions to this involve using a vertical BoxLayout, but that just seems ugly, what with the way components get stretched to fit the entire height of the window. Of course one can set the maximum sizes of the components and so on, but it seems to me that that's just making things more complicated than (I think) they ought to be. And to make matters worse the components are all crushed together with no gaps in between..
Surely a LayoutManager that stacks components vertically at their preferred sizes by default would be a fundamentally useful thing?
Well anyway... not much of a question (more of a moan), never-the-less, if anyone knows why a vertical FlowLayout doesn't exist as standard please let me know... Then later I'll have a moan about the GridLayout asking why it doesn't keep each row and column only as tall and as wide as it needs to be.
Regards
-- Mick

Answer 1

and it seems to me that there is no such thing as a vertically oriented FlowLayoutCheck out the [Relative Layout|http://www.camick.com/java/blog.html?name=relative-layout]. I know from the name you would never guess it could do a vertical FlowLayout, but it turned out to be far more flexible than I ever imagined it would be. In your case the code would be something like:
RelativeLayout rl = new RelativeLayout(RelativeLayout.Y_AXIS, 5);
//rl.setAlignment(RelativeLayout.LEADING);
rl.setAlignment(RelativeLayout.CENTER);
JPanel panel = new JPanel( rl );
panel.add(component1);
panel.add(component2);
...