Swing Hacks

Put a NASA Photo into the Background of a Text Area #7

Chapter 1, Basic JComponents

|

29

HACK

H A C K

#7

Put a NASA Photo into the Background

of a Text Area Hack #7

This hack will repurpose an existing web page, one of NASA’s photo sites, by

pulling their “Astronomy Picture of the Day” into the background of a text

area.

You’ve already learned how to draw a watermark image in the background

of a text area

[Hack #6] using a ScrollPaneWatermark. This hack will pull a

photo down from the Web and reuse that class to put the photo in the back-

ground. The photo itself comes from NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the

Day” page: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/. The URL to the image changes

each day, but the page itself does not. To pull the image down you will load

the page, find the image URL, then load the image itself and put it into the

ScrollPaneWatermark. Depending on the day, it may look something like

Figure 1-22.

Figure 1-21. Finished ScrollPane hack

Figure 1-22. Text area with a background image

30

|

Chapter 1, Basic JComponents

#7 Put a NASA Photo into the Background of a Text Area

HACK

The code in Example 1-14 defines a class called BackgroundLoader, which

implements

Runnable so it can be placed on its own thread. The constructor

takes as an argument the

ScrollPaneWatermark

, which the loader will put the

image ...