Gunnar Grim

In the early days of Java, GUI forms were written, not drawn. They were created by writing code that instantiated components and added them to containers with various layout constraints. Then the program was run and the result could be admired. This way of working, WYGIWYG (what you get is what you get) was often quite fun, more often frustrating, and never very productive. Today we have a JavaBeans specification and integrated development environments (IDEs) with GUI painters. Some of these are doing really good jobs, considering the difficulties with layout managers and platform portability. With most components, such as text fields and buttons, the principle of dropping them on the form, setting properties, and adding event listeners is quite sufficient. The JTable though is more problematic. It's just too complex to configure with simple property editors and al... (more)