Java Swing, 2nd Edition

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 ...