Java Swing, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Specialty Panes and Layout Managers

With all the spiffy Swing components out there, you might expect to see a few new layout managers to help place them, and you wouldn’t be disappointed. The Swing package includes several layout managers. However, most of these managers are designed for specific containers—JScrollPane has its own ScrollPaneLayout manager, for example. The Swing package also includes several new convenience containers that handle things such as scrolling and tabs. (We’ll take a close look at these containers and their associated layout managers in this chapter.) Figure 11-1 shows a class diagram of Swing’s specialty panes and their layout managers. The OverlayLayout and SpringLayout general layout managers can be used with any containers. We tackle them separately at the end of this chapter. (SpringLayout was added in SDK 1.4.)

Figure 11-1. Class diagram for Swing’s specialty panes and their layout managers