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by int_19h 2770 days ago
Yes, but those layout managers were also incompatible with UI designers, generally speaking.

(WinForms designer technically supports them. But it's less "drag and drop", and more like "drag and ... um, what the hell is this thing doing there now?").
1 comments
pjmlp 2769 days ago
For me it was always "drag and drop" + setting the respective properties, not sure what the problem is, other than not bothering to learn how to use them.

The only problem is how buggy VS designer in some releases tends to be, forcing to restart VS from time to time.

But that affects all kind of stuff, including apps not using layout managers.

And regarding Motif, I surely recall the GUI designers being relatively good.

Likewise with Java Swing and designers like Netbeans Matisse.

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int_19h 2769 days ago
> Likewise with Java Swing and designers like Netbeans Matisse.

Matisse is the only UI designer that I know that does true drag and drop (letting you position widgets exactly where you want them) while also producing flexible layout. And IIRC they had to write a custom Swing layout manager for that.

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pjmlp 2769 days ago
That custom Swing layout manager is a standard Java layout manager since Java 6, released in 2006.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/javax/swing/GroupL...

Sun prototyped it on Netbeans, made it open source and then when everyone was happy, it became yet another layout manager available in any Java compliant platform.

That is the whole point of a layout manager engine, they are extensible.

Which is why project Houdini is having a layout engine APIs as well.

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/05/houdini#la...

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