Also known as The Swing Tutorial
This trail
tells you how to create graphical user interfaces (GUIs)
for applications and applets,
using the Swing components.
The Swing components, which are part of the
JavaTM Foundation Classes (JFC),
can be used with either JDKTM 1.1 or
the JavaTM 2 platform.
Note:
This trail does not tell you how to use the AWT components.
Information on them is in the old UI trail,
which is available for downloading as
Creating a User Interface (AWT Only)
.
This trail is available as a book,
The JFC Swing Tutorial.
A shorter, simpler introduction
to using the Swing components
was published as a chapter in the book
The Java Tutorial, 3rd Edition and is available
online 
.
Getting Started with Swing
is a quick start lesson.
First it gives you a bit of background about the JFC
and Swing.
Then it tells you how to compile
and run programs --
both applications and applets --
that use Swing components.
Finally, it walks you through the code for a simple program.
Swing Features and Concepts
gives you the information you need
to be able to use Swing components effectively.
For example, it tells you
how Swing programs display their GUIs,
how they handle events such as mouse clicks,
and how they can use features such as borders
to help with layout.
It ends with a discussion of how the features and concepts
are used by a real program.
Using Swing Components
tells you how to use each of the Swing components --
buttons, tables, text components, and all the rest.
Using Other Swing Features
tells you how to use actions, borders, icons, and timers.
It also helps you to create multithreaded programs.
Laying Out Components Within a Container
tells you how to choose a layout manager,
how to use each of the layout manager classes the
JavaTM platform provides,
how to use absolute positioning instead of a layout manager,
and how to create your own layout manager.
Writing Event Listeners
tells you how to handle events in your programs.
Working with Graphics
tells you how to do everything from drawing lines and text
to loading, displaying, and manipulating images.
It includes information on performing animation
and on improving graphics performance.
Converting to Swing
tells you how to convert programs that use the 1.1 AWT API
to use the Swing components.
Although this is the main trail for learning about GUIs,
it isn't the only trail with UI-related information.
Here are some other trails that discuss UI topics:
-
2D Graphics,
which describes the 2D graphics features available in the Java 2 platform.
-
Sound,
which discusses the sound capabilities available in the Java 2 platform.
-
Writing Applets,
which describes API available only to applets,
such as sound capabilities in JDK 1.0 and 1.1.
-
Essential Java Classes,
which covers many topics, including properties and
the standard I/O streams.
-
The Bonus trail contains
Full-Screen Exclusive Mode API, a lesson that describes how to use API introduced in v1.4
to render graphics directly to the screen.
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