Ideas on an IDE Style Interface

[Andy_Hollywood]

Hello

No real problem, just would like some ideas, on a how to!:

I'd like to deisgn an IDE style interface, by IDE i mean a lot os JPanels, that can be moved around and docked under and next to other JPanels, so they are split my JSplit Panes etc... an ideal example is IBM's eclipse Project Java IDE, which does this very veyr well or Microsoft Visual Studio.

Now i'd like to implement a GUI that has similair characteristics, so i can havea main workspace, then a toolbox area, that is seperated by a Split, and maybe add a new panel underneath both of these that is then split again.

The ultimate would be to be able to keep adding new Panels to the window and have them split themselves, and then when panels are removed to have them unsplit etc..

I'm sure you get the idea, I've started an implementation of such a interface, but i'm not getting anywhere fast and am ready to start again, and was wondering if anyone had implemented such a GUI interface adn can therefore give me some advice on a structure etc to be able to enable the drag and drop style window movement and docking etc....,

As i'm getting lost on how to even start properly.

Any comments and suggestions, or even links to similair projects would be of great help.

Cheers in advance, and i look forward to a discussion!

Andy

[CornedBee]

The OpenSource NetBeans project has implemented it.
www.netbeans.org