How to Build a Robust and Resizable Swing-Based Chess GUI?

Making a Robust, Resizable Swing Chess GUI

This article discusses the design and implementation of a robust, resizable Swing-based Chess GUI. The specifications outlined by the User Design Team call for:

• A toolbar with buttons for common game actions
• An area reserved for future use
• A chess board that remains square while filling the available space
• Keyboard accessibility and focus indicators for chess pieces

Implementation Details

The following techniques were employed to achieve the desired functionality:

• Panel for Chess Board: A 9x9 GridLayout is used to create the chess board, with the first cell reserved for a label without text.
• Separate Button Array: To simplify game logic, an 8x8 array of buttons is maintained separately.
• Buttons for Keyboard Functionality: Buttons are used for chess board squares, enabling keyboard and mouse interactions. Margin removal allows them to shrink to the icon size.
• GridBagLayout for Square Board: The chess board is added to a GridBagLayout as the only component without specified constraints, centering it. To maintain square dimensions, the chess board queries the parent component's size and returns a preferred size that is the largest possible square while not exceeding the smaller width or height of the parent.
• Images for Chess Pieces: Images for the chess pieces are obtained and stored in a two-dimensional array.

Sample Code

The following code snippet demonstrates the initialization of the chess board and chess piece images:

for (int ii = 0; ii 

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