Big Java, 4th Edition

Chapter 18. Graphical User Interfaces

CHAPTER GOALS

• G To become familiar with common user-interface components, such as text components, radio buttons, check boxes, and menus

• G To understand the use of layout managers to arrange user-interface components in a container

• G To build programs that handle events from user-interface components

• To learn how to browse the Java documentation

In this chapter, we will delve more deeply into graphical user interface programming. The graphical applications with which you are familiar have many visual gadgets for information entry: text components, buttons, scroll bars, menus, and so on. In this chapter, you will learn how to use the most common user-interface components in the Java Swing user-interface toolkit. Swing has many more components than can be mastered in a first course, and even the basic components have advanced options that can't be covered here. In fact, few programmers try to learn everything about a particular user-interface component. It is more important to understand the concepts and to search the Java documentation for the details. This chapter walks you through one example to show you how the Java documentation is organized and how you can rely on it for your programming.

Processing Text Input

We start our discussion of graphical user interfaces with text input. Of course, a graphical application can receive text input by calling the showInputDialog method of the JOptionPane class, but popping up a separate dialog box for each ...