Java Swing

Reading this Book

We’re well aware that most readers don’t read the Preface. You have our permission to skip it, provided that you look at the Conventions section. That section is particularly important because in this book, we’re experimenting with a few new techniques for explaining the Swing classes. As we said earlier, everything in Swing is a Java Bean. This means that much of an object’s behavior is controlled by a set of properties, which are manipulated by accessor methods. For example, the property color would be accessed by the methods getColor() (to find out the color) and setColor() (to change the color). If a property has a boolean value, the get method is often replaced by an is method; for example, the visible property would have methods isVisible() and setVisible().

We found the idea of properties very powerful in helping us understand Swing. Therefore, rather than listing all of a class’s accessor methods, we decided to present a table for each class, listing the class’s properties and showing the property’s data type, which accessor methods are present, whether the property is “bound” (i.e., changing the property generates a PropertyChangeEvent), and the property’s default value. This approach certainly saves paper (you didn’t really want a 2000 page book, did you?) and should make it easier to understand what a component does and how it is structured. Furthermore, if you’re not already in the habit of thinking in terms of the JavaBeans architecture, you should ...