GridBag Amanuensis

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

This is one of the amanuensis projects. I have used the Symantec Visual Café 2.5a visual layout editor to generate source code for GridBag layouts. As you work, the display adjusts immediately to show you the effective results of the new constraints. It is quite a bit better than coding by hand and doing compile test cycles, but it still leaves a fair bit to be desired. Here are some additional features I would like, besides the ability to fill in GridBag constraints via fill-in-the-blanks.

Optionally show a pale green grid to delimit the cells. Labels them around the perimeter.
Allow you to select a group of elements and delete, or shift them as a group in steps.
Allow you to insert a empty row or column.
Allow you to tidy the table with a single command to remove all empty rows and columns.
Allow you to select a group of elements, and simultaneously set some attribute on all of them. The top left element acts as a proxy for the others. So, for example, moving the top left element to a new position would move all the other selected cells to the corresponding position, not to the same cell.
It should never let you accidentally put two elements in the same grid cell. However, if you decided to have it allow you to temporarily have collisions, both of the cell contents should be visible and the conflict should be highlighted. It should be easy to select either of the two cell’s inhabitants.
It should let you swap two selections.
Allow you to change the type of a cell without losing all the other attributes, e.g. convert a label to a TextField or vice versa.
Allow you to rename the fields.
Allow you to use named Color static final constants or complex expressions. It must not insist on selecting an absolute Color number.
Though it may work by saving pickled objects or data tables rather than generating source, it should also be able to import GridBag Java source code that it did not produce. It should leave undisturbed any embedded code it does not understand.
It should attempt to optimise the resulting code, avoiding duplicate Font, Insets and Color objects.

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