Ned Konz <ned at bike-nomad.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 13 February 2003 07:10 pm, Nevin Pratt wrote:
> 
> > I support Todd by saying that the Geomery management metaphore that
> > the Interface Builder for NeXT used (and now Apple uses) really is
> > the best I've ever seen for any GUI builder.
> 
> The strut and spring layout sounds like Swing2 (strut, spring, 
> box...).
> 
> The TableLayout is capable of doing Gtk-type box layouts pretty well. 
> Just don't try to force it into doing more than simple rows and 
> columns, and you'll find it easier to deal with.

Personally I think that of all the schemes I have seen (boxes like TeX,
struts/springs like Galaxy and others, relative as in VW, etc) I must
say that the one I liked best was the one in VisualAge Smalltalk where
each of the four edges of any component could be related to any other
edge in the composition using either a strut or a few other relations if
my memory serves.

Another developer independently ended up implementing this model in a
very large Java project I worked in, and called it AttachmentLayout.

I guess it is similar to strings/struts but with (don't know about NeXT)
the possible difference that the relations where orthogonal to the
composition structure (parent/child) IIRC - is it like that in NeXT too?

regard, Göran