— Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems Chairman, President and ceo

layout 
managers

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using 
swing
you are here
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The Big Three layout managers: 
border, flow, and box.
BorderLayout
A BorderLayout manager divides a background 
component into five regions. You can add only one 
component per region to a background controlled 
by a BorderLayout manager. Components laid out 
by this manager usually don’t get to have their 
preferred size. BorderLayout is the default layout 
manager for a frame!
FlowLayout
A FlowLayout manager acts kind of like a word 
processor, except with components instead of 
words. Each component is the size it wants to be, 
and they’re laid out left to right in the order that 
they’re added, with “word-wrap” turned on. So 
when a component won’t fit horizontally, it drops 
to the next “line” in the layout. FlowLayout is the 
default layout manager for a panel!
BoxLayout
A BoxLayout manager is like FlowLayout in that 
each component gets to have its own size, and 
the components are placed in the order in which 
they’re added. But, unlike FlowLayout, a BoxLayout 
manager can stack the components vertically (or 
horizontally, but usually we’re just concerned with 
vertically). It’s like a FlowLayout but instead of 
having automatic ‘component wrapping’, you can 
insert a sort of ‘component return key’ and force 
the components to start a new line.
one component 
per region
components added left 
to right, wrapping to a 
new line when needed
components added top 
to bottom, one per ‘line’

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404
 
chapter 13
BorderLayout cares 
about five regions: 
east, west, north, 
south, and center