Laying Out an Application

The layout managers you have seen thus far were applied to an entire frame; the setLayout() method of the frame was used, and all components followed the same rules. This setup can be suitable for some programs, but as you try to develop a GUI with Swing, you often find that none of the layout managers fit.

One way around this problem is to use a group of JPanel objects as containers to hold different parts of a GUI. You can set up different layout rules for each of these parts by using the setLayout() methods of each JPanel. After these panels contain all the components they need to contain, you can add the panels directly to the frame.

The next project develops a full interface for the program you write during the ...

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