Core Java™ 2 Volume II - Advanced Features, Seventh Edition

Lists

If you want to present a set of choices to a user, and a radio button or checkbox set consumes too much space, you can use a combo box or a list. Combo boxes were covered in Volume 1 because they are relatively simple. The JList component has many more features, and its design is similar to that of the tree and table components. For that reason, it is our starting point for the discussion of complex Swing components.

Of course, you can have lists of strings, but you can also have lists of arbitrary objects, with full control of how they appear. The internal architecture of the list component that makes this generality possible is rather elegant. Unfortunately, the designers at Sun felt that they needed to show off that elegance, rather ...