Introducing Swing

PART III

Introducing GUI Programming with Swing

CHAPTER 31

Introducing Swing

In Part II, you saw how to build very simple user interfaces with the AWT classes. Although the AWT is still a crucial part of Java, its component set is no longer widely used to create graphical user interfaces. Today, most programmers use Swing or JavaFX for this purpose. JavaFX is discussed in Part IV. Here, Swing is introduced. Swing is a framework that provides more powerful and flexible GUI components than does the AWT. As a result, it is the GUI that has been widely used by Java programmers for more than a decade.

Coverage of Swing is divided between three chapters. This chapter introduces Swing. It begins by describing Swing’s core concepts. It then shows the general form of a Swing program, including both applications and applets. It concludes by explaining how painting is accomplished in Swing. The next chapter presents several commonly used Swing components. The third chapter introduces Swing-based menus. It is important to understand that the number of classes and interfaces in the Swing packages is quite large, and they can’t all be covered in this book. (In fact, full coverage of Swing requires an entire book of its own.) However, these three chapters will give you a basic understanding of this important topic.