Swing Hacks

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Preface

Why Swing Hacks?

The term hacking has a bad reputation in the press. They use it to refer to

people who break into systems or wreak havoc with computers as their

weapon. Among people who write code, though, the term hack refers to a

quick-and-dirty solution to a problem, or a clever way to get something

done. And the term hacker is taken very much as a compliment, referring to

someone as being creative, having the technical chops to get things done.

The Hacks series is an attempt to reclaim the word, document the good

ways people are hacking, and pass the hacker ethic of creative participation

on to the uninitiated. Seeing how others approach systems and problems is

often the quickest way to learn about a new technology.

In the short term, we hope this book will show you how to do fun things

that will enhance your own applications directly. Some are visual enhance-

ments to make your software look better. Some are functional improve-

ments to make your software do something it couldn’t do before. Some are

even just plain silly, in print only to prove it could be done. Whatever your

interest, we hope you will find both better ways of doing old things and

learn something new about techniques you never even thought of.

In the long term, we hope this book will give you a small glimpse of the

applications coming in the future. This year (2005) we hope will be a water-

shed year for Java on ...