Learning Java, 4th Edition

The JTabbedPane Class

If you’ve ever right-clicked on the desktop to set your Display Properties in Windows, you already know what a JTabbedPane is. It’s a container with labeled tabs (e.g., Themes, Screen Saver, Appearance). When you click on a tab, a new set of controls is shown in the body of the JTabbedPane. In Swing, JTabbedPane is simply a specialized container.

Each tab has a name. To add a tab to the JTabbedPane, simply call addTab(). You’ll need to specify the name of the tab as well as a component that supplies the tab’s contents. Typically, it’s a container holding other components.

Even though the JTabbedPane only shows one set of components at a time, be aware that all the components on all the pages are alive and in memory at one time. If you have components that hog processor time or memory, try to put them into a “sleep” state when they are not showing.

The following example shows how to create a JTabbedPane. It adds standard Swing components to a tab named Controls. The second tab is filled with a scrollable image, which was presented in the previous examples.

    //file: TabbedPaneFrame.java
    import java.awt.*;
    import java.awt.event.*;
    import javax.swing.*;
    import javax.swing.border.*;

    public class TabbedPaneFrame {
      public static void main(String[] args)
      {
        JFrame frame = new JFrame("TabbedPaneFrame");
        JTabbedPane tabby = new JTabbedPane();

        // create the controls pane
        JPanel controls = new JPanel();
        controls.add(new JLabel("Service:"));
        JList list = new JList(
            new String ...