Java Foundation Classes in a Nutshell

Development of Swing continues, and Java 1.3 will ship with a new version that

includes a number of minor changes and improvements to the Swing API. This

futur erelease will focus on improving the existing APIs and should not add many

new APIs.

Labels and HTML

In the initial releases of Swing 1.1 and Java 1.2, the JLabel, JButton, and related

classes that display textual labels can display only a single line of text using a sin-

gle font. In Swing 1.1.1 and Java 1.2.2, however, components like these can dis-

play multiline, multifont text using simple HTML formatting. To display formatted

text, simply specify a string of HTML text that begins with an

<HTML> tag. You can

use this feature to present text using multiple fonts, font styles, and colors. Just as

important, however, the introduction of HTML allows you to specify multiline

labels.

This new formatted text display feature is available in Java 1.2.2 for the

JLabel,

JButton, MenuItem, JMenu, JCheckBoxMenuItem, JRadioButtonMenuItem, JTabbed-

Pane, and JToolTip classes. It is not supported (at least in Java 1.2.2) by JCheckBox

or JRadioButton, however. For matted text display is particularly useful with JOp-

tionPane dialog boxes (described later in this chapter), as they display text using

inter nal

JLabel objects.

Actions

A GUI application often allows a user to invoke an operation in a number of dif-

fer ent ways. For example, the user may be able ...