Graphics Environments
SDK 1.4 recognizes a great deal of information about its
environment. You can retrieve that information for your own code through
the GraphicsEnvironment , GraphicsDevice
, and GraphicsConfiguration classes from the java.awt package. While they aren’t part of
Swing proper, these classes are definitely useful for Swing
applications, especially those that take full advantage of their
environment.
To sum up these classes, a system keeps a local GraphicsEnvironment object that describes the
devices on the system with an array of GraphicsDevice objects. Each GraphicsDevice contains (or at least may
contain) multiple configurations of device capabilities (such as pixel
formats or which visual screen you’re on) bundled up in an array of
GraphicsConfiguration objects.
Tip
The GraphicsConfiguration
class should not be confused with the DisplayMode class (although it’s easy to do
so). The display mode is something with which most savvy computer
users will be familiar. On a system that supports multisync monitors,
the DisplayMode class encapsulates
the width, height, color-depth, and refresh rate information for a
given mode. The GraphicsConfiguration class stores things
like square versus rectangular pixels. GraphicsConfiguration could even be used for devices such as printers. The configuration information is highly dependent on the native platform and thus varies widely from system to system. In any given system, both configurations and modes can be found through the ...