SAMS Teach Yourself Programming with Java™ in 24 Hours, FOURTH EDITION

Hour 13. Building a Simple User Interface

Because of the popularity of Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh systems, computer users have come to expect certain things from their software. It should feature a graphical user interface, take user input from a mouse, and work like other programs.

These expectations are a far cry from the heyday of MS-DOS and other command-line systems, when the user interface varied greatly with each program you used, and point-and-click was something photographers did.

Programs that use a graphical user interface and mouse control are called windowing software. Although you probably have been using a command-line interface to write Java programs, during this hour you create windowing programs using a group of classes ...