Swing Hacks

Preface

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How to Use This Book

You can read this book from cover to cover if you like, but each hack stands

on its own, so feel free to browse and jump to the different sections that

interest you most. If there’s a prerequisite you need to know about, a cross-

reference will guide you to the right hack. The code all works (we tried it)

but in case you can’t get a hack to work, let us know at the book’s web site:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/swinghks. You can also download the book’s

code online, or contribute your own tips and tricks. If we collect enough

new material, and this book sells more than 10 copies, then the publishers

might let us make Swing Hacks 2: The Endless Repaint.

With few exceptions, the hacks in this book were written for Java 2 Stan-

dard Edition (J2SE), version 1.4, which you can get from http://java.sun.com/

j2se/. A few hacks depend on open source packages, which are freely down-

loadable from their home pages, as described in the hack itself. The only

exceptions are two hacks that use QuickTime for Java—this is freely avail-

able from Apple (and installed by default on Mac OS X), but it is propri-

etary and available for Mac and Windows only.

Because this is a book about Swing, the program listings will be using the

classes from the Swing and AWT packages, so we’ve skipped

import javax.

swing.*

and import java.awt.* statements for space. You can also assume

that any listing ...