For the locations: I assume you now use Common. You can only set the initial layout, you have only a limited control of what the user does later. So we are only talking about the initial layout.
You might want to have a look at the „Paint“ application, it does almost the same thing as you just described.
dinamically tabbing in the center (somthing like the eclipse regular views)
There is a class called „CWorkingArea“ which behaves exactly like this eclipse-center-area. The CWorkingArea is itself a Dockable, so we can represent this center-area with the CWorkingArea.
Each CDockable is either a child of a working-area or not. The user cannot change this, a child of a working-area cannot be dragged outside, a non-child cannot be dragged inside a working-area. If the working-area has no children at all, it appears as an empty grey panel.
First you set up the empty frame, containing a CContentArea only:
CControl control = ...
CContentArea content = control.getContentArea();
frame.add( content );```
Assuming you already know which views to show, we can add them all at once. The class CGrid offers the necessary methods. (CGrid is a "helper class", it has no important role in the framework. It is just a collection of algorithms. We could produce the exact same result without it, but would need to write more code.)
```// create the standard-views
SingleCDockable navigator = new ....
SingleCDockable console = new ...
SingleCDockable help = new ...
// create the center
CWorkingArea center = control.createWorkingArea( "center-area" );
// use CGrid to register the views and to make the initial layout
CGrid grid = new CGrid( control );
// first the positions (x,y,width,height) of each element is stored ...
grid.add( 0, 0, 2, 10, navigator );
grid.add( 2, 0, 8, 6, center );
grid.add( 2, 6, 8, 4, console, help );
// ... then we make everything visible.
// Further changes to "grid" won't have any effect to "content"!
content.deploy( grid );
To open new views on the center-area, we have first to associate the new view with „center“, then make it visible:
MultipleCDockable view = new ...
// set its initial location: on "center", taking up as much space as possible
view.setLocation( CLocation.working( center).rectangle( 0, 0, 1, 1 ) );
// connect "center" with "view"
view.setWorkingArea( center );
// register the new view
control.add( view );
// make thew new view visible
view.setVisible( true );```
For the looks: [CControl.setTheme(String)](http://dock.javaforge.com/doc/bibliothek/gui/dock/common/CControl.html#setTheme(java.lang.String)) will do the trick. The name of theme used by Notes is [ThemeMap.KEY_BUBBLE_THEME](http://dock.javaforge.com/doc/bibliothek/gui/dock/common/layout/ThemeMap.html#KEY_BUBBLE_THEME).
The buttons itself are [CActions](http://dock.javaforge.com/doc/bibliothek/gui/dock/common/action/package-tree.html), e.g. a [CButton](http://dock.javaforge.com/doc/bibliothek/gui/dock/common/action/CButton.html) (each DefaultCDockable has a method "addAction"...).
