I’m trying to develop a Java program that does the following:
- uses a background picture of a network diagram of clients
- positions an image of a bandwidth graph to respective client
- refreshes the image of graph every 5 seconds which it fetches from another program that constantly produces snapshots of bandwidth
Now, I can set the background picture and I’m pretty confident that I will be able to refresh the images by using a timer. What I am trying to plan out is how I am going to position these images to the respective clients which is displayed in the background picture. I did some research and it appears that I have several options but I want to make sure I am choosing the right one before I run into problems further down the line.
It seems to me that using a GridBagLayout would be the choice for me, however I would like a second opinion for a more experienced population. If using a GridBagLayout is the correct choice, could you recommend any good tutorials that would help me understand this Layout Manager? Please keep in mind that I have limited experience with Java, especially with GUI oriented Java.
EDIT: If I am not explaining the concept well enough please let me know.
If you want to do advanced layouts, you should take a look at MigLayout.
It’s an extremely flexible layout manager that can pretty much act as a replacement for any/all of the existing Swing layout managers. It’s worth using if you want to do difficult / complex layouts.
It feels more like a HTML table layout tool, enabling multi-column spans etc. and arbitrary scaling rules.
The “Quick Start Guide” is very good with lots of examples – I’d suggest taking a look at that if you want to evaluate MigLayout for your project.