A Panel
is a fairly generic Container
whose primary purpose is to subdivide the drawing area into
separate rectangular pieces. Since each Panel
can have
its own LayoutManager
, you can do many things with
panels that you can't do with a single LayoutManager
.
For example, suppose you want a TextArea
in the
center of an applet with a Button
below, like
this:
There's no single LayoutManager
that will produce
this. A BorderLayout
will expand the
Button
to fill the entire width of the applet. A
FlowLayout
won't make the TextArea
big
enough.