Java: The Complete Reference, Eleventh Edition, 11th Edition

CHAPTER

31

Introducing Swing

In Part II, you saw how to build very simple user interfaces with the AWT classes. Although the AWT is still a crucial part of Java, its component set is no longer widely used to create graphical user interfaces. Today, programmers typically use Swing for this purpose. Swing is a framework that provides more powerful and flexible GUI components than does the AWT. As a result, it is the GUI that has been widely used by Java programmers for more than a decade.

Coverage of Swing is divided between three chapters. This chapter introduces Swing. It begins by describing Swing’s core concepts. It then presents a simple example that shows the general form of a Swing program. This is followed by an example that uses event ...