Java Programming 24-Hour Trainer, 2nd Edition

Lesson 8Introducing the GUI with Swing

These days people are accustomed to working with applications that have rich user interfaces. JavaFX is Oracle’s newest platform for development of such applications. Lessons 11 and 12 introduce you to JavaFX. JavaFX is a layer on top of Java Swing — a library of components, which for many years was used for building graphic user interfaces (GUIs) for desktop applications, as well as a web program called applets (GUI programs running inside the web browser’s Java run-time plug-in).

Today Java applets are rarely used, which is the reason why I decided not to include chapters about applets in this edition of the book. Instead, I’ve added coverage of the more modern JavaFX framework. In this and the following lesson you learn the principles of building GUIs while developing a simple desktop calculator using the Java Swing library.

NOTE   Eclipse Foundation offers another library of UI components called the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), available at https://wiki.eclipse.org/SWT, which is outside of the scope of this book.

Swing Basics

Originally Java offered a pretty basic library of UI-related classes called the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT). A couple of years later a new widget toolkit called Swing was introduced. Swing offers a lighter set of UI components while keeping the main idea intact — to keep UI development independent of the end user’s operating system. Run the same program on Windows and on Mac OS, and GUI components ...