Archived  March 1998

Two Swing services -- the SpringLayout manager and the Target manager -- failed to keep up with the pack during the development of Swing. So we have reluctantly dropped them from the Swing component set.

We deleted SpringLayout manager because it had several serious design problems. The biggest problem was that SpringLayout did not set any initial size and position information for the components it managed. This behavior was contrary to the way in which all other AWT and Swing layout managers work, and thus had been a source of confusion among developers.

The SpringLayout manager also deviated in several unusual ways from most other "springs-and-struts" tools, and we didn't like that either. We concluded that these deviations should be fixed before the Swing API freeze locked the SpringLayout manager into place -- we also concluded that there wasn't enough time. So the SpringLayout manager was pulled altogether.

We dropped the Target manager because there wasn't enough time to write good examples of Target manager operations or to provide comprehensive documentation for the Target manager API. At press time, we hadn't received any feedback at all from developers about the Target manager, and we didn't think the tool had been tested enough to freeze it in its current state for the FCS release of Swing.

We hope that dropping these two managers won't impact many customers. But we realize that some developers may have used them -- especially the SpringLayout manager -- in Swing programs. That's why we're providing the source code for these two managers with this issue of The Swing Connection.

If you have any comments or complaints about our deleting these two APIs, please send them to our swing-feedback address -- and if you decide to make any improvements in the source code we're providing during the course of maintaining the code, we would particularly appreciate your sending us any revisions in the code that you'd like to share.