MigLayout: Easing the Pain of Swing/SWT Layout Management

ne of the pain points of both Swing and SWT UI development is the tediousness of coding layout constraints, in particular the more complex ones. With Swing in particular, Java programmers have suffered for many years under the crushing weight of GridBagLayout and its extreme verbosity (not to mention complexity). The new GroupLayout in JDK6 has eased this pain somewhat, but only if you use a UI designer that supports it (such as NetBeans Matisse or SWT Designer from Instantiations). Writing the GroupLayout code by hand is nearly impossible for a mere mortal, because it is so complex and unintuitive. And maintaining it manually is even worse; even the slightest change in layout potentially requires a lot of code changes.

Hence, for many years the only viable option for those who preferred to code their layout by hand (or for whom UI designers were just not powerful enough) was the excellent open-source FormsLayout, (created by Karsten Lentzsch).