| Sun Microsystems’ Java™ programming language has quickly become one of the most popular programming languages in use today. Its platform independence is only one reason for this success. Other reasons include its powerful object-oriented approach to programming and its built-in memory management. The fact that it is freely available from Sun Microsystems’ web site does not hurt its popularity either! However, as many of you have undoubtedly discovered, programming from a text editor and a command-line compiler is not always the most efficient way to develop professional applications. This is where the Borland® JBuilder® product comes in. JBuilder gives you 100 percent pure Java but in an easy-to-use environment. The JBuilder development environment is as easy to use as any of the popular RAD (rapid application development) tools available.
Java offers a powerful set of classes you can use to create graphical user interfaces (GUI) for your users. The first set of classes that Java offered was the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT). However, with the advent of Java 2, you have access to a newer and richer set of classes for constructing GUIs. This new set of classes is found in the Java Foundation Classes (JFC) and Swing classes. In this book I show you how to use the various JFC and Swing classes. Each technique is shown with JBuilder, but the complete source code is also given so that readers who do not have JBuilder can still use this book. The examples were all done with either JBuilder version 7.0 or 8.0.
This book has some specific characteristics of which you should be aware. Even though it is not a textbook per se, I still use some techniques you would expect to find in a textbook. The end of each chapter has a chapter summary and a set of review questions. These are provided to help ensure that you have mastered the essential concepts of that chapter. |
|
|
|
