Exploring Swing

CHAPTER  32

Exploring Swing

The previous chapter described several of the core concepts relating to Swing and showed the general form of both a Swing application and a Swing applet. This chapter continues the discussion of Swing by presenting an overview of several Swing components, such as buttons, check boxes, trees, and tables. The Swing components provide rich functionality and allow a high level of customization. Because of space limitations, it is not possible to describe all of their features and attributes. Rather, the purpose of this overview is to give you a feel for the capabilities of the Swing component set.

The Swing component classes described in this chapter are shown here:

JButton

JList

JTable

JCheckBox

JRadioButton

JTextField

JComboBox

JScrollPane

JToggleButton

JLabel

JTabbedPane

JTree

These components are all lightweight, which means that they are all derived from

JComponent.

Also discussed is the ButtonGroup class, which encapsulates a mutually exclusive set of Swing buttons, and ImageIcon, which encapsulates a graphics image. Both are defined by Swing and packaged in javax.swing.

One other point: The Swing components are demonstrated in applets because the code for an applet is more compact than it is for a desktop application. However, the same techniques apply to both applets and applications.