Swing Hacks

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Chapter 12, Miscellany

#97 Mirror an Application

HACK

This hack performs a simple visualization: it creates translucent rectangles

with solid labels. The same technique could be used to create a much more

dynamic interface displaying more detailed information, such as button state,

component IDs, color settings, or any other artifact of Swing components.

One thing to notice here is that there are two or more labels visible at any

given time. This is because of the nesting of components—if the cursor is

over a text field and that text field is inside of a panel, then technically the

cursor is over both components, producing two labels. You could enhance

the

ComponentGlassPane to only draw one label by creative use of the

SwingUtilities.getDeepestComponentAt( ) method.

H A C K

#97

Mirror an Application Hack #97

With creative use of the AWT event log, you can bind two instances of an

application together over a socket, creating a mirroring effect.

One of the coolest—and severely underrated—features of Java is serializa-

tion. Because Java code runs entirely in a virtual machine, it’s possible to

send objects over the network to another program and have the objects still

functional when they get there. One day while perusing the AWT documen-

tation, I came across the

AWTEventListener. I wondered what interesting

thing you could do by capturing all of the events in a program. I could write

Figure 12-11. ...