Java Swing - Softcover

Loy, Marc; Eckstein, Robert; Wood, Dave; Elliott, James; Cole, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0596004087 ISBN 13: 9780596004088

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, 2002

Synopsis

Swing is a fully-featured user interface development kit for Java applications. Building on the foundations of the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT), Swing enables cross-platform applications to use any of several pluggable look-and-feels. Swing developers can take advantage of its rich, flexible features and modular components, building elegant user interfaces with very little code.This second edition of Java Swing thoroughly covers all the features available in Java 2 SDK 1.3 and 1.4. More than simply a reference, this new edition takes a practical approach. It is a book by developers for developers, with hundreds of useful examples, from beginning level to advanced, covering every component available in Swing.All these features mean that there's a lot to learn. Even setting aside its platform flexibility, Swing compares favorably with any widely available user interface toolkit--it has great depth. Swing makes it easy to do simple things but is powerful enough to create complex, intricate interfaces.Java Swing, 2nd edition includes :

• A new chapter on Drag and Drop
• Accessibility features for creating a user interface meeting the needs of all users
• Coverage of the improved key binding infrastructure introduced in SDK 1.3
• A new chapter on JFormattedTextField and input validation
• Mac OS X coverage and examples
• Coverage of the improved focus system introduced in SDK 1.4
• Pluggable Look-and-Feel coverage
• Coverage of the new layout manager, SpringLayout, from SDK 1.4
• Properties tables that summarize important features of each component
• Coverage of the 1.4 Spinner component
• Details about using HTML in components
• A new appendix listing bound actions for each component
• A supporting web site with utilities, examples, and supplemental materials

Whether you're a seasoned Java developer or just trying to find out what Java can do, you'll find Java Swing, 2nd edition an indispensable guide.

About this title

Review:

Java Swing, long regarded as the authoritative book on using the Swing classes, is available in a new edition that builds on a solid foundation in exploring the Java 2 Swing additions and modifications. This is a big, tremendously detailed, exhaustively researched, and ultimately authoritative reference that pushes the limits of what a book can do toward eliminating the necessity of writing experimental programs to see how Swing classes work in practice. You'll find in these pages bits of software that show how most of Swing works: all of the major features get lavish attention, while most of the minor classes are demonstrated adequately, as well.

You could probably find demonstrations free of charge on the Internet, however. The true value of this work is in the comments its five authors have attached to their copious examples. They can be quite specific: at least one such segment warns that default Swing behavior violates Mac OS X user interface guidelines and explains how to work around the problem. Another section explains how the methods of the UndoableEdit class can be used in various ways, to implement different user interface behavior options. Some readers will head straight to the O'Reilly Web site, where they can grab the code and examine it in an editor rather than in print--code listings take up a lot of space here--but everyone will appreciate the concise hierarchy, method, and property documentation, as well as the wisdom contained in the prose. --David Wall

Topics covered: The Swing classes for creating graphical user interfaces in the Java programming language. It covers all the windowing stuff--dialogs, buttons, containers, layouts, lists, and that kind of thing--as well as tables, trees, text-manipulation classes, formatted text, drag and drop, and accessibility support.

About the Author:

Marc Loy is a senior programmer at Galileo Systems, LLC, but his day job seems to be teaching Java and Perl to various companies -- including Sun Microsystems. He has played with Java since the alpha days and can't find his way back to C. He is developing an interactive learning application at Galileo written entirely in Java. He received his master's degree in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and still lives in Madison with his partner, Ron Becker. He does find time to relax by playing the piano and/or throwing darts, depending on how successful the day of teaching or programming was.

Robert Eckstein, an editor at O'Reilly, works mostly on Java books (notably Java Swing) and is also responsible for the XML Pocket Reference and Webmaster in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition. In his spare time he has been known to provide online coverage for popular conferences. He also writes articles for JavaWorld magazine. Robert holds bachelor's degrees in computer science and communications from Trinity University. In the past, he has worked for the USAA insurance company and more recently spent four years with Motorola's cellular software division. He is the co-author of Using Samba.

David Wood is Technical Director of Plugged In Software in Brisbane, Australia, where he works with a wonderful team producing Java custom software. In his eclectic career he has been a ship's navigator, deep sea salvage engineer, and aerospace project manager for the U.S. Navy, and consulted to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Netscape. David enjoys hiking and sailing with his very patient wife and teaching his son Perl before he goes to kindergarten. David holds degrees in mechanical, electrical, aeronautical, and astronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and the Virginia Military Institute.

a senior software engineer at Berbee, with over ten years professional experience as a systems developer. He started designing with objects well before work environments made it convenient, and has a passion for building high-quality Java tools and frameworks to simplify the tasks of other developers.

has been working with Java since its early days and teaches the language at venues ranging from Sun Microsystems to public high school. He has a BA from Oberlin College and an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

About this edition

• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0596004087
• ISBN 13: 9780596004088
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 1278