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

Workshop: Using Image Icons and Toolbars

One of the easiest ways to improve the visual appeal of a graphical user interface is to use icons, or small images used to identify buttons, menu items, and other parts of an interface.

With many of the components in the Swing class library, you can label a component with an image instead of text by using the ImageIcon class in the javax.swing package.

You can create an ImageIcon from a file on your computer by calling the ImageIcon(String) constructor method. The argument to the method is either the name of the file or its location and name, as in these examples:

ImageIcon stopSign = new ImageIcon("stopsign.gif");
ImageIcon saveFile = new ImageIcon("images/savefile.gif");

Watch Out! Make note of the ...