I’m making a simple JFrame with the GUI editor in netbeans with a background image set as an icon in a label as suggested by the netbeans site, with a label and a button centered. I was having a very hard time centering them without using the null layout and setting the pixels to center them. I have an 800X600 image as the background, and I don’t want the window to be resizeable. So I unchecked resizeable in the properties, and on the code tab I have designer size set to 800, 600, generate size is checked, and the form size automatically sets to 816, 638. This then gives me a border around the right and bottom sides of a few pixels. If I change the Form Size to 800, 600, then the background image is cut off by a few pixels. One other thing that I set that may impact that is in the properties=>bounds set to 800, 600, 800, 600.
Any advice on how to get rid of the border without allowing the window to be resizeable as well as any on whether a different layout can help with centering would be greatly appreciated. I did find some information that Grid Bag layout would help, but I wasn’t quite able to get it working correctly. I suppose that writing out the code instead of using the GUI editor may also be a better alternative, but I’m pretty new so any advice on that would be great as well.
Don’t use null layout when you can center components quite easily if you use the correct layout or combination of layouts. For instance if you want a JLabel next to a JButton and have them centered in a JPanel, put the JLabel and JButton into their own JPanel first (make sure to have this JPanel’s opaque property set to false) and then have the containing JPanel use GridBagLayout. If you add one component (the inner JPanel) without GridBagConstraints, the component is centered automatically, even if the containing JPanel is resized. It’s almost idiot-proof, whereas null layout is a recipe for difficult hard to maintain code.