Getting Started with Swing

Getting Started with Swing is the first lesson in the so-called Swing Tutorial. The lesson has two parts: About the JFC and Swing and Compiling and Running Swing Programs.

The first is as dull as it sounds, albeit of theoretical importance. It is essentially a reminder of the transparency of Java - a reminder that the power of Java lies in the huge collection of classes, already written by someone else, but made available for everyone. So while you can use a development environment like NetBeans, you can also access the functionality of the classes with hand written code.

This is important. If you want to program in VB (to create a Windows app) but you don't like the development environment, you are pretty well buggered. But if you want to create a GUI with Java, and you don't like NetBeans, you can either use another development environment, or you can do the whole thing with a text editor, provided you follow the rules very carefully.

The second part of the lesson is also very dull (another sodding "Hello World" variant), but it includes a moderately interesting link in small print. This is Running Tutorial Examples in NetBeans IDE. A link is provided to download NetBeans (for anyone who missed the riveting "Hello World!" for the NetBeans IDE). After installing NetBeans, you can download one or more example projects. Instructions are then provided on how to load a project into NetBeans, and from there compile it and run it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A few notes on JavaScript

I am one the 99% of the world who has long nursed the misconception that JavaScript has something to do with Java. And why not? The name sort of implies it. It was only after I searched without success on the Java Tutorial site for some mention of JavaScript that I stumbled across the knowledge that JavaScript was in fact developed by Netscape, under the name LiveScript. Armed with that knowledge, it is not surprising to find the best reference information on Mozilla site. According to Wikipedia , the nonsensical name choice had something to do with Netscape wanting to cash in on the popularity and cachet of Java, and Sun wanting support for Java technology in the then popular Netscape browser. For a while only the Netscape family of browsers supported JavaScript. Microsoft later produced what it calls JScript to run in its browser. JScript is similar but not identical to Javascript. According to Foldoc JavaScript runs a hundred times slower than C , and ten
Read more

Forum Comments on Java Applets

It is so long since I last posted on the once was Sun/Java now is Oracle developer forum my account seems to have been ditched. While I wait to have it resurrected I've done a little searching in the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) forum using the search term "Applet". My first search, using the default 3 month period, yielded nothing. No one had posted anything about or even mentioned Applets in the last three months. So either they are very easy to use and work very well, so hardly anyone has any problems with them, or maybe ... not very many people use them at all. My stomach was beginning to churn a bit, when I extended the search period to the current year - and with good reason. Somebody, a little bit like me I think, had written a game in an applet, and wanted to record top scores in a database. He described his connection problem in this thread , and the first reply began: Doing JDBC calls from an Applet is such a bad idea that I am glad y
Read more

Creating a Custom Swing Component

Image
I always return to my blog when I'm stuck, and I'm stuck right now. I want to create a custom Swing component. Specifically, I want something like a JProgressBar , with the following changes: In place of a flat Foreground color, I want a rainbow spectrum, showing only the red range for low Values, and the whole spectrum for values close to the Maximum value; Instead of a rectangular box, I want the progress "bar" to take the shape of a normal, or Gaussian, distribution curve; I want progress to be displayed by the area under the curve, rather than by a simple linear scale along the x axis. It's not that there isn't stuff out there. I have five tabs open in my browser, specifically addressing the creation of custom components in Swing, as well as the source code for the JProgressBar . It is that, like everything to do with Java, it is bloody difficult to read. I shall begin from the horse's mouth as it were, with an article on the Java
Read more