Question

I have been building a Java version of Monopoly in my spare time and am having some trouble understanding layouts etc for Swing.

Each one of my spaces on the board is a essentially a custom JButton and I have been trying to lay them around the edge of a frame (like on the monopoly board itself). I can’t seem to find a useful explanation of how the layout system works and so am having trouble do so.

Could someone please give me an example of how they would lay the buttons around the edge of the frame? Should I be using a different layout?

Answer 1

This seems to lend itself to work best with a BorderLayout. I would recommend creating 4 JPanels that will contain all of the JButtons.

Then add the JPanels to the BorderLayout.North, South, East, and West.

That seems to me to probably be the easiest way to layout the buttons.

Here is a great place to start using a BorderLayout.

I just threw together some code that may help you get started laying this out. It has not been compiled.

int boardWidth;
int boardHeight;
int boardSquareHeight;
int boardSqusreWidth;
JPanel north = new JPanel();
JPanel south = new JPanel();
Dimension northSouthD = new Dimension(boardWidth, boardSquareHeight);
north.setPreferedSize(northSouthD);
south.setPreferedSize(northSouthD);
JPanel east = new JPanel();
JPanel west = new JPanel();
Dimension eastWestD = new Dimension(boardSquareHeight, boardHeight - 2 * boardSquaareWidth);
east.setPreferedSize(easWestD);
west.setPreferedSize(easWestD);
// add all of the buttons to the appropriate JPanel
parentPanel.setLayoutManager(new BorderLayout());
parentPanel.add(north, BorderLayour.NORTH);
...