Someone who is still a student suggesting a poor replacement for Swing layout system is a tiny tiny mistake compared to the colossal clusterf**c WTF that is the Swing layout system. If you try to code it by hand, you end up with something unusable and horrible. When you use IDE tools you are forever tied to use those tools (no switching from NetBeans to Eclipse, ever). In NetBeans those tools make it easy to produce unmaintainable garage and accidentally delete a magical hidden comments that are critically important for NetBeans.
The entire Swing feels like it was designed by people who have never created interfaces or used frameworks of any kind. Most of what you need is sort of there, but pain in the ass to use. Some of the things you would definitely need are either missing from the SDK version you are using or broken in the version you are using (no obvious feature like table sorting in this version, but in the next. Sun was more like Apple than most ever knew.).
If for some reason you do not yet hate Swing, never take a look how same thing are done in Qt. E.g., in Qt you set widgets into a layout with what ever methods make sense with that layout and most of the time you end up what you meant. In Swing you set layout into a widget and add widgets into a widget (wtf?), get Picasso style layout, give up because documentation says layout classes are meant for use by IDEs, and use graphical tools in IDE to produce garbage that will not look right on any other platform.