Swing

Introduction

This tutorial describes some basic Swing components.

Introduction

JComponent Class

Some Swing Components

Introduction

Many Swing components are available to us for developing applications and applets with graphical user interfaces.  We can have components such as JLabels and JToolTips that exist to present information to the user.  We can also have components such as JButtons, JTextFields, JCheckBoxes and JRadioButtons that exist to get input from the user.  

These component classes come with many useful methods of their own but other useful methods are inherited from parent classes.

JComponent Class

Almost all Swing components inherit from the JComponent class.  The diagram below shows the class inheritance structure.

Some useful methods of the JComponent class that are inherited by components such as JButton etc. are setToolTipText, setBorder and getBorder, setForegroundColor and getForegroundColor, setBackground and getBackground and setEnabled.  This is not a comprehensive list of the methods of the JComponent class, there are many more useful methods. 

Also, JComponent inherits from Container and Component which provide many useful methods. The Component class includes everything from providing layout hints to supporting painting and events. The Container class has support for adding components to the container and laying them out.

Some Swing Components

The Swing components we will consider in this tutorial are:-

There are other Swing components which will not be covered in this tutorial, such as JScrollPane, JProgressBar, JSlider amongst others.