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Is there a LayoutManager in the Java API that would allow me to do like this?

I'm programming this level creator for a game me and a few of my friends are doing but as of right now the GUI is using a null layout, which I don't want to. It works fine for now, but I'm still against it and I know everyone else also encourages you to ALWAYS use a LayoutManager. I'm not really willing to compromise the design as it is right now, so I pretty much want to know if there's a LayoutManager that allows me to create a GUI that looks like this:
IT HAS TO BE IN THE STANDARD JAVA API! :)

This looks like a good job for a BorderLayout. Put the buttons inside a nested container as the NORTH element. Add the JScrollPane as the CENTER component. The grid itself looks like it is a good candidate for a GridBagLayout or perhaps a GridLayout.

Short answer, yes: GridBagLayout. But that'll be a pain to work out and debug.
Long answer: It looks to me like you could do this best with a BorderLayout, a JPanel for the JButtons, and a JTable with custom TableCellRenderers and TableCellEditors.

Check the excellent documentation available for Java by Sun itself:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/visual.html
Can you spot the GridLayout and GridBagLayout? If you put it into a scrollable container, that should do the trick.

Use GroupLayout for the overall panel and a custom paint method for the map.
I don't think many people here would recommend GroupLayout because it's more complicated than the other layout managers. I like it because it produces great scalable results, so I invested the time in understanding it. Now, I hardly use anything else - especially for user interaction panels with buttons and text fields.
For the map, though, I would create a custom MapPanel and overwrite paintComponent(). Sure you have to write your own custom scrolling algorithm, but I think that's a small benefit for not having to deal with scroll bars. You could make it so someone could just drag the mouse around and move the map. Use the mouse wheel to zoom, and make the interface very intuituve. If you want to paint scrollbars, you can do that too.
I've built several interfaces using models like this. I've built several maps for games using this model, as well as a financial market charting package. It makes it very easy to add custom functionality to do some great things that would be a nightmare to try to do in a JTable.

How to implement view with Label in Java Swing?

Assume that the back is using a JTextPane, and I would like to implement a view with a label. But how can I implement the view in Java? is that something like UIView on iPhone on the Java Swing? Thanks.

If I understand correctly, you would like to display a JLabel on top of a JTextPane. If so, use a JLayeredPane.
Read the Swing tutorial on layered panes to learn how to use them.

Are you looking for something like this?
See Twinkle

There's nothing special about this; just pack an extra JPanel along the bottom of your window, and put a JLabel into it; set the text of the JLabel as needed.

Interactive JTable

I would like to create an interactive JTable. For this, I would like to add JPanels in the cells of the table. Once the JPanels are in the cells, I can add my various components to the JPanels thus making the table interactive. Each JPanel could have different components. Would it be possible to accomplish this and only have to create 1 table cell editor and 1 table cell tenderer. Does anyone know of a better way to do it?
Thanks
EDIT: Thanks for the responses. I actually already have a framework I am using. I just needed a JTable that users could drag and drop images in, play movies, display graphs, etc... I already have the functionality to do those things, I just needed a JPanel to add them too. I wanted it to be displayed in a JTable so the cells could be sorted, moved, add/delete rows/col, and well structured. I couldn't get it to work using the JTable, so I went ahead an created my own. Its just a JPanel that contains smaller JPanels (the table cells) using the GridLayout. It works well enough for my puposes. Just a pain to rewrite all of the functionality from scratch that a table has.

This is hard. JTable actually uses the cell renderers only for painting the cell content. I would recommend to check if a gridlayout packaged into a scrollpane would be the easier solution.

It sounds like you're trying to use JTable as a docking framework. Assuming this is the case you're better off using something like MyDoggy or JDock which allow you to decompose your GUI into multiple split pane areas.

JSplitPane may be an alternative in this context: one pane would hold the JTable, while the other displays expanded details of the selected row. A compete example using GridLayout is shown here.

Adjusting positions of swing components

I have a JFrame in which i have to insert JLabels, textfields and JButtons. I am able to these but how can i adjust them to the required position, i want to add one label and textfield in one row and then nxt label and textfield in the next row but they are coming in the same horizontal line. i have used flowLayout with the JFrame. please tell me how to adjust them accordingly. thanks

The key to distributing components in a Container in Swing is the Layout Manager. There are various types out there. To do what you are looking for, you might want to consider the GridLayout. It is pretty easy to set up. You first need to create the layout. The following will create a two columned layout with as many rows as you provide:
GridLayout gl = new GridLayout(0,2);
Then you apply it to your panel:
JPanel panel = new JPanel(gl);
Then you add your items:
panel.add(textfield1);
panel.add(button1);
panel.add(textfield2);
panel.add(button2);
The GridLayout will handle moving from row to row after you fill in the columns with components.

had a look at gridbaglayout? Should serve your purpose.

A GridLayout may be what you want, or a combination of a GridLayout and a FlowLayout. Look at the LayoutManager tutorial to get a better idea of when and how to use and combine the various layout managers.

You need to study the various types of layouts swing provides.
Also you can have a look at FormLayout,provide by JGoodies. I prefer to use this than swing layouts as i find it easy to code and less lines of code

You are using the default Swing Layout Manager. If you want different behaviour (which is very reasonable) then you need to use another LayoutManager. Several exists both from Sun and "out there".
In order for you to be able to choose, you need to know how they work. I can strongly recommend using the Java Tutorial for this:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/layout/using.html
Let us know if you need more than provided by e.g. nested BorderLayout's or TableLayout.

If you want to be able to position the UI elements in your application (nearly) absolutely, consider using a decent GUI builder like Matisse in NetBeans or Swing UI Designer in IntelliJ IDEA.

In Java Swing how can you manage a list of panels allowing multiple panels to be selected?

I’m working on an in-house app that tracks a bunch of tasks. I wanted to have a simple task monitor that would list the task name and the task’s status. I need this to look just a little nice, I’m no designer so whatever I do is going to suck, but a basic text display won’t work for the project requirements.
What I am essentially attempting to do is show something similar to the Firefox download window, the I-Tunes download window, and well I could name more but they all look basically the same. In each of these apps, each of the ‘progress panels’ is selectable. So to implement this I thought it would be simple to just use a list of JPanels each with a JProgressBar and a JLabel, each of which can just accept focus to determine if it and others are selected. I thought this was going to be an easy task, but if I use a JList it just displays text. I then just figured I would show all the task panels in a larger panel, but I cannot get the inner panels to recognize focus.
Is there a pattern for this? Is there a rolled standard solution that I just have not found? Or is there a better method for doing this? I don’t want to re-invent the wheel, but I thought this was just going to be simple.

It sounds like what you may be looking for is an JList.
You can add your items to the JList's by first adding your "task" to the JList object's ListModel (see the Create a Model section from The Java Tutorials), and then you'll want to assigned a custom ListCellRenderer which will accept your "task" and render on the JList as a JPanel in the list itself. The key here is to make your custom ListCellRenderer be able to display your "task" in the JList the way you want to have it show on the JList.
Take a look into the Writing a Custom Cell Renderer section from the How to Use Lists page of The Java Tutorials. It will describe how to make your custom ListCellRenderer so you can represent your "task" as anything you want.
To keep it short, you will implement the ListCellRenderer interface by implementing the getListCellRendererComponent which will return a Component which is the representation of your task in the JList. You'll probably want to either construct or instantiate your JPanel in this method and return it as the Component.

The standard way of doing this kind of things is to use JTable (or JList) as a container.
You don't have to use default renderes fot table cells, but you can specify your own renderer for specific cells. Take a look at CellRenderer

How about a JTable (which you can set to allow multiple rows to be selected) with an internal JPanel occupying the single cell in each row, which contains a JProgressBar and a JLabel. Or you could use a JList with the same structure as I just described.