Sams Teach Yourself Java™ in 24 Hours, Sixth Edition

Using Image Icons and Toolbars

One of the easiest ways to improve the visual appeal of a GUI is to use icons, small images used to identify buttons 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.

Caution

Although some operating systems use the \ character to separate folders and filenames, the ImageIcon constructor requires the / character as a separator.

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 = ...