| Copyright © 2004 Christopher M Butler | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
Eleritec Docking Framework Tutorial
 Working with Child Ports |
 Looking Under the Hood |
Border Management
Swing applications are notorious for displaying a number of poor user interface design choices. One of those design flaws often stems from compounded borders that are created as a result of nesting components within one another. Because tabbed panes and split panes come prebuilt with their own borders, and the text components or panel components placed within them usually have their own borders, this nesting of borders creates a cluttered looking effect that greatly detracts from the user experience of the application as a whole.
This problem becomes a significant issue for any docking framework. Unlike an application with a relatively static component layout, the layout of an application with dockable components is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. It is therefore somewhat difficult and messy to programmatically add and remove borders within the application code itself as components are docked and undocked.
The DefaultDockingPort takes these issues into account when performing docking operations. Its default behavior is to do nothing in terms of swapping in and out borders in these situations. However, the framework does provide a BorderManager interface for use with the DefaultDockingPort.
| Working with Child Ports |
Looking Under the Hood |