[news.eclipse.newcomer] Question regarding visual editor

[jbeall.eclipse@xxxxxxxxxxx (Joshua Beall)]

Hi All,

I have what I imagine may seem a very silly question... but I just had the 
need for a *very* simple GUI app, and I decided to play with Eclipse's 
visual editor tool.  You can get to this by adding a "Visual Class" to 
your project.

It worked fine, and I set the LayoutManager to null (as I saw in a demo on 
eclipse.org), so that I could simply position my widgets wherever I wanted.

That all worked great, and if I hit "run as bean" my app would come up, 
and it worked exactly as I wanted.

In order to have it run as a regular Java app I added a public static void 
main(String args[]) routine, and had it setup a JFrame, and then add an 
instance of my visual class.

That worked fine except that the resulting window (when I ran the app) was 
tiny.  In order to be able to see any of my windows I had to manually grab 
the window handles and resize the window.  I couldn't figure out how to 
get the window to automatically be the correct size.

I tried using some of the layout managers, and if I did that, then the 
window wasn't too small, but I'm struggling with getting things laid out 
how I want using the layout managers (I'm new to Java GUI development).  
For my purposes I'd rather just position them exactly where I want.  I'm 
the only one that is ever going to use this app that I'm writing, and if I 
ever want it changed, I'll change it.

So basically my question is, can I use the visual editor to design a class 
with no layout manager (positioning the widgets precisely where I want), 
and use that in an app somehow?  If I just add it like this:

       JFrame.setDefaultLookAndFeelDecorated(true);
       JFrame frame = new JFrame("MyApp");
       frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);

       MyAppGUI app = new MyAppGUI();
       frame.getContentPane().add(app);

       //Display the window.
       frame.pack();
       frame.setVisible(true);

Then I wind up with the tiny window that I described...