Introduction

Java has had windowing capabilities since its earliest days. The first version made public was the Abstract Windowing Toolkit, or AWT. AWT used the native toolkit components, so it was relatively small and simple. AWT suffered somewhat from being a "least common denominator"; a feature could not be added unless it could be implemented on all major platforms that Java supported. The second major implementation was the Swing classes, released in 1998 as part of the Java Foundation Classes. Swing is a full-function, professional-quality GUI toolkit designed to enable almost any kind of client-side GUI-based interaction. AWT lives inside, or rather underneath, Swing, and, for this reason, many programs begin by importing both java.awt and javax.swing. An alternate approach is exemplified by IBM's SWT (Standard Windowing Toolkit), which is a thin wrapper for direct access to the underlying toolkit. SWT is used in building the Eclipse IDE discussed in Recipe 1.3. It's possible to build new applications using SWT, but Swing is more portable and more widely used.

This chapter presents a few elements of Java windowing for the developer whose main exposure to Java has been on the server side. Most of the examples are shown using Swing, rather than the obsolescent AWT components; SWT is not covered at all. I assume that you have at least a basic understanding of what GUI components are, which ones should be used where, and so on. I will refer to JButton, JList, and JFrame, to name a few, without saying much more about their basics or functionality. This is not intended to be a complete tutorial; the reader needing more background should refer to Java in a Nutshell or Head First Java. For a very thorough presentation on all aspects of Swing, I recommend Java Swing by Marc Loy, Bob Eckstein, Dave Wood, Jim Elliott, and Brian Cole (O'Reilly). At around 1,250 pages, it's not an overnight read. But it is comprehensive.

Java's event model has evolved over time, too. In JDK 1.0, the writer of a windowed application had to write a single large event-handling method to deal with button presses from all the GUI controls in the window. This was simple for small programs, but it did not scale well. My JabaDex application had one large event handler method that tried to figure out which of 50 or 60 GUI controls had caused an event, which was tedious and error prone. In JDK 1.1, a new delegation event model was introduced. In this model, events are given only to classes that request them, which is done by registering a listener. This is discussed in Recipe 14.4 and shown in Example 14-1. At the same time, the language was extended ever so slightly to include the notion of inner classes . An inner class is simply a class whose definition is contained inside the body of another class. We use examples of two types of inner classes here; for details on the half-dozen different categories of inner classes, the reader is referred to Java in a Nutshell.

Most of the GUI construction techniques in this chapter can be done for you, in some cases more quickly, by an integrated development environment (IDE). I have always believed, however, that understanding what goes on inside the code should be a prerequisite for being allowed to use an IDE. Those who disagree may be inclined to skip this chapter, go press a few buttons, and have the computer do the work for them. But you should at least skim this chapter to see what's going on so that you'll know where to look when you need it later.

See Also