Introducing the Windowing Toolkit

In the previous chapter, you explored the AWT's support for graphics, fonts, colors, and images. In this chapter, you'll explore the AWT's support for GUIs. This support is manifested by way of the AWT's windowing toolkit.

The windowing toolkit is a combination of entities and code that binds these entities to the underlying windowing system. Entities include components, containers, layout managers, events, and listeners.

Components lie at the heart of a GUI. They range from buttons, labels, and text fields to lists, choices, menus, and scrollbars. By using either the mouse or keyboard, a user can interact with most of these components to accomplish useful tasks.

Containers (such as frames and panels) organize ...

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