A Reduction of Grid-Bag Layout to Auckland Layout

Many major programming platforms support layout managers in Grid-bag style, where GUI elements can be placed on a rectangular grid. In Grid-bag layout mangers, cells of the underlying grid can be merged in order to create more complex layouts. In this work we classify software engineering issues with Grid-bag layout managers - chiefly bad coupling and a low level of abstraction - into several levels of severity of these issues. In the past we have presented the Auckland Layout Model, which is based on tabstops instead of gridlines. The Auckland Layout Model provides several layers of abstraction and avoids the bad coupling phenomena encountered in Grid-bag Layout. In this work we report on a platform-independent reduction of Grid-bag Layout to Auckland Layout, thus establishing that Grid-bag Layout can be implemented on top of Auckland Layout Model. The reduction of Grid-bag Layout to Auckland Layout presented here is based on an abstract datatype called a Grid-bag analyzer.