Question

With this code I will have the following window. I created 2 panels and added the mainp one to the frame and the panel to the mainp I did this in order to make window resizing dynamic (so the panel wont resize to the frame) I tried making my default panel size wider so that the text fields and label become wider but panel.setsize doesn’t seem to do anything.

// creates the labels
 studId = new JLabel("Student ID");
 studAvg = new JLabel("Student Average");
 studName = new JLabel("Student Name");

 // creates the text fields
 JTextField studIdText = new JTextField();
 JTextField studAvgText = new JTextField();
 JTextField studNameText = new JTextField();

 JPanel mainp = new JPanel();

 JPanel panel = new JPanel();
  panel.setLayout(new GridLayout(3, 2, 2, 2));

            panel.setSize(300, 100);

    // adds to the GridLayout
    panel.add(studId);
    panel.add(studIdText);
    panel.add(studName);
    panel.add(studNameText);
    panel.add(studAvg);
    panel.add(studAvgText);

    mainp.add(panel);
    add(BorderLayout.CENTER,mainp);

    // verifies the textfields
    studIdText.setInputVerifier(new IntVerifier());
    studAvgText.setInputVerifier(new DoubleVerifier());

    setTitle("Student Form");
    setSize(300, 200);
    setLocationRelativeTo(null);
    setDefaultCloseOperation(EXIT_ON_CLOSE);

Answer 1

using Advise from @Dan and @MADprogrammer and @trashgod i came up with the following

JTextField studIdText = new JTextField(20);

JPanel panel = new JPanel();
panel.setLayout(new GridBagLayout());
GridBagConstraints r1 = new GridBagConstraints();

r1.fill = GridBagConstraints.HORIZONTAL;
r1.weightx = 0.0;
r1.gridx = 0;
r1.gridy = 0;
panel.add(studId,r1);

r1.weightx = 0.5;
r1.gridx = 1;
r1.gridwidth = GridBagConstraints.REMAINDER; 
panel.add(studIdText,r1);

of course you can make GridBagConstraints for every row and just change the gridy