Mac OS X for Java Geeks

An Example Swing Application

This section introduces a fairly comprehensive Swing application and details its various components. This application is used throughout the rest of this book as the foundation application (so you can run each sample without having to create new windows, set up the menu bar, and perform other mundane tasks). For that reason, be sure to code and compile the application and have the source code handy before diving into future chapters.

Tip

For those of you who don’t like large code blocks, especially when it’s mostly GUI setup code, understand that this section is a necessary evil; it’s the basis for several future applications, all of which are made up of more interesting code fragments and concepts.

Source Code Listing

This application also demonstrates techniques that factor out and partition portions of your application to increase team development, as well as an introduction to concepts (such as dynamic class loading) used in later chapters. In this example, these modules are referred to as plug-ins. If you’ve used an application such as Adobe Photoshop or the NetBeans development environment, you’ve been exposed to applications that serve as a framework and then load other modules. Example 4-1 shows the entire class listing.

Example 4-1. The sample Swing application

package com.wiverson.macosbook; import javax.swing.JMenuItem; import javax.swing.JButton; import javax.swing.JComponent; import javax.swing.JMenu; import java.awt.Cursor; import java.awt.BorderLayout; ...