Chapter 10. Working with Layout Components

One of the key aspects of developing web applications with rich user interfaces is creating content holder components with rich look and feel. But creating complex content holder components using plain HTML is tedious process and Java developers may not be good enough at web designing to create fancy user interfaces.

We may want to show data in tabbed panels or in accordion style. Similarly we might want to create Panels with various customizations such as minimizable, closable and with support for toolbar options.

Many of the web applications follow Border Layout style templates with a standard header on top, a navigation bar on left side and copyright information at the bottom.

Also, in many of the web applications, we may need to implement workflow kind of processes with a series of forms (also called Wizards) for collecting data step by step and complete the process once all the necessary information is provided.

To support these types...