Re: [Rails-devel] The UI

[Brett L. <wak...@ea...>]

>>I haven't investigated the feasibility of this, and its a few years since
>I
>>last dabbled in Swing, but I recall that layout managers can be nested,
>and
>>though complex, GridBagLayout is a *very* powerful layout manager.
>>
>>Given that the stock chart itself is basically just a collection of
>square,
>>numeric fields, would it not be possible to use a JTextField for each
>"box"
>>and control the layout with nested layout mangers. Switching on borders=
 to
>>get the grid effect is relatively simple.
>
>Yes, this is the right thing to do. If you regarc a hexagonal gird as a
>rectangular
>one with alternate rows (or columns, depending on the grain direction)
>offset by
>half a cell, you can do that too. You can use a JPanel for cell, and then
>drop
>JLabels in for things like the price, and even for the tokens. You should
>be
>able
>to set borders and background colours without too much difficulty.



I've been playing around with this a bit. It looks like you guys are right.



>I haven't looked at the Graphics-2D API yet, I've produced sufficient with
>Swing
>for what I've done to date. My original 18xx map rendering was done with
>AWT
>rendering, since I wrote it pre-Swing: you can see it on my home page:
>http://www.cosgor.demon.co.uk . <aside>The 1998 (c) refers to the last
>modification,
>which was the water symbol rendering, the original Java code was late 1996
>or early 1997 (and the original C code even older than that).</aside>
>
>ISTR some of this code is not how I would write it now, but I should be
>able to dig up the source for the applet if it's of interest.


Reusing existing code is always a good thing. I doubt it would take much=
 work to update 
your old code to work with some of the newer (faster) objects in Swing and=
 Graphics2D.

Once we get the stockmarket functional, let's definitely take a look at=
 using some of your 
existing code, Iain.

---Brett.