Java Swing

Chapter 1. Introducing Swing

Welcome to Swing! By now, you’re probably wondering what Swing is, and how you can use it to spice up your Java applications. Or perhaps you’re curious as to how the Swing components fit into the overall Java strategy. Then again, maybe you just want to see what all the hype is about. Well, you’ve come to the right place; this book is all about Swing and its components. So let’s dive right in and answer the first question that you’re probably asking right now, which is...

What Is Swing?

If you poke around the Java home page (http://java.sun.com/ ), you’ll find Swing advertised as a set of customizable graphical components whose look-and-feel can be dictated at runtime. In reality, however, Swing is much more than this. Swing is the next-generation GUI toolkit that Sun Microsystems is developing to enable enterprise development in Java. By enterprise development, we mean that programmers can use Swing to create large-scale Java applications with a wide array of powerful components. In addition, you can easily extend or modify these components to control their appearance and behavior.

Swing is not an acronym. The name represents the collaborative choice of its designers when the project was kicked off in late 1996. Swing is actually part of a larger family of Java products known as the Java Foundation Classes ( JFC), which incorporate many of the features of Netscape’s Internet Foundation Classes (IFC), as well as design aspects from IBM’s Taligent division ...