SWINGS IN JAVA

PROGRAMMING IN JAVA ASSIGNMENT

FACULTY : MS. CHARU WAHI SALONI NANDA BBA4519/09 SHUBHI SINGH BBA4530/09 SALONI SHARMA BBA4542/09 NIHARIKA CHUGH BBA4547/09 10/25/2010

WHAT IS A SWING?
To create a Java program with a graphical user interface (GUI), we use swings in java .The Swing toolkit includes a rich set of components for building GUIs and adding interactivity to Java applications. Swing includes all the components you would expect from a modern toolkit: table controls, list controls, tree controls, buttons, and labels. Swing is far from a simple component toolkit, however. It includes rich undo support, a highly customizable text package, integrated internationalization and accessibility support. To truly leverage the cross-platform capabilities of the Java platform, Swing supports numerous look and feels, including the ability to create your own look and feel. The ability to create a custom look and feel is made easier with Synth, a look and feel specifically designed to be customized. Swing wouldn't be a component toolkit without the basic user interface primitives such as drag and drop, event handling, customizable painting, and window management. Swing is part of the Java Foundation Classes (JFC). The JFC also include other features important to a GUI program, such as the ability to add rich graphics functionality and the ability to create a program that can work in different languages and by users with different input devices.

FEATURES OF SWINGS
The following list shows some of the features that Swing and the Java Foundation Classes provide.

Swing GUI Components

The Swing toolkit includes a rich array of components: from basic components, such as buttons and check boxes, to rich and complex components, such as tables and text. Even deceptively simple components, such as text fields, offer sophisticated functionality, such as formatted text input or password field behavior. There are file browsers and dialogs to suit most needs, and if not, customization is possible. If none of Swing's provided components are exactly what you need, you can leverage the basic Swing component functionality to create your own.

Java 2D API
To make your application stand out; convey information visually; or add figures, images, or animation to your GUI, you'll want to use the Java 2DTM API. Because Swing is built on the 2D package, it's trivial to make use of 2D within Swing components. Adding images, drop shadows, compositing it's easy with Java 2D.

Pluggable Look-and-Feel Support

Any program that uses Swing components has a choice of look and feel. The JFC classes shipped by Sun and Apple provide a look and feel that matches that of the platform. The Synth package allows you to create your own look and feel. The GTK+ look and feel makes hundreds of existing look and feels available to Swing programs. A program can specify the look and feel of the platform it is running on, or it can specify to always use the Java look and feel, and without recompiling, it will just work.

Data Transfer
Data transfer, via cut, copy, paste, and drag and drop, is essential to almost any application. Support for data transfer is built into Swing and works between Swing components within an application, between Java applications, and between Java and native applications.

Internationalization
This feature allows developers to build applications that can interact with users worldwide in their own languages and cultural conventions. Applications can be created that accept input in languages that use thousands of different characters, such as Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. Swing's layout managers make it easy to honor a particular orientation required by the UI. For example, the UI will appear right to left in a locale where the text flows right to left. This support is automatic: You need only code the UI once and then it will work for left to right and right to left, as well as honor the appropriate size of components that change as you localize the text.

Accessibility API
People with disabilities use special software assistive technologies that mediates the user experience for them. Such software needs to obtain a wealth of information about the running application in order to represent it in alternate media:

for a screen reader to read the screen with synthetic speech or render it via a Braille display, for a screen magnifier to track the caret and keyboard focus, for on-screen keyboards to present dynamic keyboards of the menu choices and toolbar items and dialog controls, and for voice control systems to know what the user can control with his or her voice. The accessibility API enables these assistive technologies to get the information they need, and to programmatically manipulate the elements that make up the graphical user interface.

Undo Framework API

Swing's undo framework allows developers to provide support for undo and redo. Undo support is built in to Swing's text component. For other components, Swing supports an unlimited number of actions to undo and redo, and is easily adapted to an application.

THE SWING ARCHITECTURE

Foundations
Swing is platform independent both in terms of expression (Java) and implementation (Look-and-Feel).

Extensible
Swing is a highly partitioned architecture, which allows for the "plugging" of various custom implementations of specified framework interfaces: Users can provide their own custom implementation(s) of these components to override the default implementations. In general, Swing users can extend the framework by extending existing (framework) classes and/or providing alternative implementations of core components.Swing is a component-based framework. The distinction between objects and components is a fairly subtle point: concisely, a component is a wellbehaved object with a known/specified characteristic pattern of behaviour. Swing objects asynchronously fire events, have "bound" properties, and respond to a wellknown set of commands (specific to the component.) Specifically, Swing components are Java Beans components, compliant with the Java Beans Component Architecture specifications...

Customizable
Given the programmatic rendering model of the Swing framework, fine control over the details of rendering of a component is possible in Swing. As a general pattern, the visual representation of a Swing component is a composition of a standard set of elements, such as a "border", "inset", decorations, etc. Typically, users will programmaticaly customize a standard Swing component (such as a JTable) by assigning specific Borders, Colors, Backgrounds, opacities, etc., as the properties of that component. The core component will then use these properties (settings) to determine the appropriate renderers to use in painting its various aspects. However, it is also completely possible to create unique GUI controls with highly customized visual representation.

Configurable
Swing's heavy reliance on runtime mechanisms and indirect composition patterns allows it to respond at runtime to fundamental changes in its settings. For example, a Swing-based application can change its look and feel at runtime. Further, users can provide their own look and feel implementation, which allows for uniform changes in the look and feel of existing Swing applications without any programmatic change to the application code.

Lightweight UI
Swing's configurability is a result of a choice not to use the native host OS's GUI controls for displaying itself. Swing "paints" its controls programmatically through the use of Java 2D APIs, rather than calling into a native user interface toolkit. Thus, a Swing component does not have a corresponding native OS GUI component, and is free to render itself in any way that is possible with the underlying graphics APIs.However, at its core every Swing component relies on an AWT container, since (Swing's) JComponent extends (AWT's) Container. This allows Swing to plug into the host OS's GUI management framework, including the crucial device/screen mappings and user interactions, such as key presses or mouse movements. Swing simply "transposes" its own (OS agnostic) semantics over the underlying (OS specific) components. So, for example, every Swing component paints its rendition

on the graphic device in response to a call to component.paint(), which is defined in (AWT) Container. But unlike AWT components, which delegated the painting to their OS-native "heavyweight" widget, Swing components are responsible for their own rendering.

Loosely-Coupled and MVC

The Swing library makes heavy use of the Model/View/Controller software design pattern[1], which conceptually decouples the data being viewed from the user interface controls through which it is viewed. Because of this, most Swing components have associated models (which are specified in terms of Java interfaces), and the programmer can use various default implementations or provide their own. The framework provides default implementations of model interfaces for all of its concrete components. The typical use of the Swing framework does not require the creation of custom models, as the framework provides a set of default implementations that are transparently, by default, associated with the corresponding JComponent child class in the Swing library. In general, only complex components, such as tables, trees and sometimes lists, may require the custom model implementations around the application-specific data structures. To get a good sense of the potential that the Swing architecture makes possible, consider the hypothetical situation where custom models for tables and lists are wrappers over DAO and/or EJB services. Typically, Swing component model objects are responsible for providing a concise interface defining events fired, and accessible properties for the (conceptual) data model for use by the associated JComponent. Given that the overall MVC pattern is a loosely-coupled collaborative object relationship pattern, the model provides the programmatic means for attaching event listeners to the data model object. Typically, these events are model centric (ex: a "row inserted" event in a table model) and are mapped by the JComponent specialization into a meaningful event for the GUI component.The view component of a Swing JComponent is the object used to graphically "represent" the conceptual GUI control. A distinction of Swing, as a GUI framework, is in its reliance on programmatically-rendered GUI controls (as opposed to the use of the native host OS's GUI controls). Prior to Java 6 Update 10, this

distinction was a source of complications when mixing AWT controls, which use native controls, with Swing controls in a GUI (see Mixing AWT and Swing components). Finally, in terms of visual composition and management, Swing favors relative layouts (which specify the positional relationships between components) as opposed to absolute layouts (which specify the exact location and size of components). This bias towards "fluid"' visual ordering is due to its origins in the applet operating environment that framed the design and development of the original Java GUI toolkit. (Conceptually, this view of the layout management is quite similar to that which informs the rendering of HTML content in browsers, and addresses the same set of concerns that motivated the former.)

Relationship to AWT

Relationship to SWT
The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a competing toolkit originally developed by IBM and now maintained by the Eclipse community. SWT's implementation has more in common with the heavyweight components of AWT. This confers benefits such as more accurate fidelity with the underlying native windowing toolkit, at the cost of an increased exposure to the native platform in the programming model.The advent of SWT has given rise to a great deal of division among Java desktop developers, with many strongly favoring either SWT or Swing. Sun's development on Swing continues to focus on platform look and feel (PLAF) fidelity with each platform's windowing toolkit in the approaching Java SE 7 release (as of December 2006). There has been significant debate and speculation about the performance of SWT versus Swing; some hinted that SWT's heavy dependence on JNI would make it slower when the GUI component and Java need to communicate data, but faster at rendering when the data model has been loaded into the GUI, but this has not been confirmed either way[2]. A fairly thorough set of benchmarks concluded that neither Swing nor SWT clearly outperformed the other in the general case[3]. SWT serves the Windows platform very well but is considered by some[who?] to be less effective as a technology for cross-platform development. By using the highlevel features of each native windowing toolkit, SWT returns to the issues seen in the mid 90's (with toolkits like zApp, Zinc, XVT and IBM/Smalltalk) where toolkits attempted to mask differences in focus behaviour, event triggering and graphical layout. Failure to match behavior on each platform can cause subtle but difficult-toresolve bugs that impact user interaction and the appearance of the GUI.Swing provides a richer set of components than AWT. They are 100% Java-based. AWT on the other hand was developed with the mind set that if a component or capability of a component wasn't available on one platform, it won't be available on any platform. Something quickly portable from platform x, to y, to z. Due to the peerbased nature of AWT, what might work on one implementation might not work on another, as the peer-integration might not be as robust. Many of the original AWT problems were traceable to differences in peer implementations.

There are a few other advantages to Swing over AWT: Swing provides both additional components and added functionality to AWTreplacement components Swing components can change their appearance based on the current "look and feel" library that's being used. You can use the same look and feel as the platform you're on, or use a different look and feel Swing components follow the Model-View-Controller paradigm (MVC), and thus can provide a much more flexible UI. Swing provides "extras" for components, such as: o Icons on many components o Decorative borders for components o Tooltips for components Swing components are lightweight (less resource intensive than AWT) Swing provides built-in double buffering Swing provides paint debugging support for when you build your own components Swing also has a few disadvantages: It requires Java 2 or a separate JAR file If you're not very careful when programming, it can be slower than AWT (all components are drawn) Swing components that look like native components might not act exactly like native components

Java Swing class hierarchy

The class JComponent, descended directly from Container, is the root class for most of Swings user interface components.

Java Swing Examples

Below is a java swing code for the traditional Hello World program. Basically, the idea behind this Hello World program is to learn how to create a java program, compile and run it. To create your java source code you can use any editor or you can use an IDE like Eclipse. import javax.swing.JFrame; import javax.swing.JLabel; //import statements //Check if window closes automatically. Otherwise add suitable code public class HelloWorldFrame extends JFrame {

public static void main(String args[]) { new HelloWorldFrame(); } HelloWorldFrame() { JLabel jlbHelloWorld = new JLabel("Hello World"); add(jlbHelloWorld); this.setSize(100, 100); // pack(); setVisible(true); } } Output