History and Future

TableLayout is a well-tested and well-used layout manager. It has been around in one form or another since 1996. Over many years, TableLayout has been refined. It may now be as perfect as a layout manager can be. So it is unlikely that there will be subsequent version unless someone suggests a change that would significantly improve Tablelayout, and that change must be added to the core of TableLayout.

However, ancillary support for TableLayout may be added to this site. Some suggestions have been to add TableLayout support to Netbeans, Forte, JBuilder, and other RAD tools. Since such ancillary "plug-ins" are not necessary to use TableLayout, and may be tool or JDK specific, they would be provided as extension jar files.

The main goal of the TableLayout project is to submit TableLayout to Sun for entry into JDK 1.6. If you would like to see this happen, you can voice your opinion here.

The brief history of TableLayout is...

1996-2001	TableLayout was written to the JDK 1.0 and JDK 1.1 using custom classes for LinkedLists, etc. This version of TableLayout was never published, but was used by the author extensively. Most of the layout manager was written up front, but over time a few useful features were added.
2001	TableLayout was modified to use only core Java classes from the JDK including the JDK 1.2 collections framework. Non-standard classes were removed. The API for TableLayout was modified to be more consistent with established Java conventions. The author contacted Sun and submitted the layout manager. A Sun representative asked the author to write an article about TableLayout for The Swing Connection. The article was submitted to Sun and reviewed along with the layout manager by several Sun architects. TableLayout was further refined based on the feedback from Sun. The article and TableLayout were published on Sun's website. This was the first official version of TableLayout.
2002	The author received many positive messages from users across the world. Some of the messages contained requests for features like justification for components occupying more than one cell. The requests that would most improve TableLayout were implemented.
2002	An extension jar for TableLayout was created based on an idea from a developer to use the persistent delagation mechanism introduced in JDK 1.4 to save and load frames.
2003 Oct 1	A fix is provided for a problem dealing with the preferred size of containers containing components spanning multiple cells with absolute widths/heights.
2003 Nov 4	TableLayout now supports component orientation. Two new justifcations have been added: LEADING and TRAILING. Leading justification means components are left justified if their container is left-oriented and right justified if their container is right-oriented. Trailing justification is opposite. Also, a constructor in the form new TableLayout(double [] columns, double [] rows) has been added for convenience.
2003 Dec 11	Corrected vertical gaps.
2004 Feb 15	Added leading and trailing constaints to TableLayoutConstraints.toString method.
2004 May 9	Added caching of the methodGetComponentOrientation field in TableLayout.
2005 April 8	Fixed leak of XML Decoder in TableLayoutPersistenceDelegate class located in TableLayoutPersistenceDelegate.jar. Fixed a javadoc comment for TableLayoutConstraints constructor. Fixed a bug in getting the minimum size of a container that used preferred column/row sizes and getting the preferred size of a container that used minimum column/row sizes.
2005 May 5	Updated the javadoc description of TableLayout.
2005 June 15	Added convenience constructors to TableLayoutConstraints. Fixed the sizes of cell spanning components that were not full justified. They were getting extra space from gaps.
2005 September 14	TableLayout no longer flips container insets for right-to-left oriented containers since most java.awt layouts and Swing components do not (FlowLayout is the exception). Minor performance tweak in the layoutContainer method. Compatibility fix with old JDKs that did not support component orientation.
2007 March 6	TableLayoutConstraints constructor was setting LEADING justification to FULL due to an omission. Fixed this constructor.

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