I wanted to have a discussion on Java GUIs, right now, I’m still in school and I’ve done light gui development for class.(We briefly covered it.)
Plain and simple, I couldn’t do anything I want, I wanted to build a nice clean layout but everything looked off and worse when you maximize it. JButton were huge when put inside a GridLayout, or they spanned the whole row, when I clearly specified the size of the button and etc. It’s been one headache after another with Java gui development.
With Microsoft WPF/XAML UI development is more straightforward, it felt like HTML/CSS. Setting the width, height, margin, and padding is great, knowing where my components are going to be puts the mind at ease. And you can even design a custom Look and Feel.
I wanted to know if do you guys have any tips and resources for someone starting Java GUI development. And the one thing I don’t get is launch new items with a JFrame, i.e a game.
At Launch your directed to a panel with 4 buttons.
Play Game – Takes you to a new panel to play the game.
Lobby – Takes you to a chat like interface
and etc
Should these be panels? Or more JFrames, like when a user click a button I launch the Play Game JFrame then close the menu JFrame. I really have no ideas with Java guis.
First off take a look at Mig Layout. This is a real full featured layout manager and currently is the best one available. If for some reason you can’t use external dependencies then you will want to look at GridBagLayout. GridBagLayout will be powerful enough to do everything you need, but it is not as easy to use as something like Mig Layout.
In 99% of the applications you will build you will have a single JFrame and just transition the JPanels to show the different screens.