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Totally Gridbag

SpuddyCited 3× on HN, 2009–2022
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comedy · intermediate · evergreen · 2009–2022 on HN

Totally Gridbag is a short humorous animation about the frustrations of Java Swing's GridBagLayout, originally made as a Flash cartoon.

It is posted as an in-joke whenever Java GUI layout, Swing or desktop UI toolkits come up.

3 comments from Hacker News

@QuercusMax2022-03 · in “The decline and fall of Java on the desktop”

Absolutely agree, provided you use a layout manager that isn't brain damaged. Anyone remember this video? ▶ this video - Totally Gridbag

@LoSboccacc2020-10 · in “If Not SPAs, What?”

well we're talking about the tooling, but point taken, swing wasn't perfect (totally grid bag 2007 short ▶ this video ) but it's not like it was that worse than flex bugs ( link still does render differently in chrome than firefox - which one is wrong is immaterial)

@biohacker422009-03 · in “Qt 4.5.0 released (Let the LGPL apps begin)”

It's a double edged sword. On the one hand, you know what APIs they've committed to and won't change. On the other hand, often you want to extend more then they would "allow". And because you're wrapping their APIs, when those APIs change, you should only have to change your code in the one place where you overloaded them. There's a lot of bad things said about JFC/Swing, I won't repeat them here, but it did allow you to extend almost everything. And as a side note, GridBagLayout is powerful and elegant, despite what some people say: ▶ this video