Java > Core SWING advanced programming > 1. THE SWING TEXT COMPONENTS: CREATING CUSTOMIZED INPUT FIELDS
Chapter 1. THE SWING TEXT COMPONENTS: CREATING CUSTOMIZED INPUT FIELDS
Topics in this Chapter
Introduction to the Swing Text Components
Text Component Architecture
Custom Text Components
Keymaps and Keyboard Bindings
Creating a Custom Caret
The Swing text components are much more powerful than their Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) counterparts. This is partly because of the more complete application programming interface (API) that the Swing components provide, but the most useful new features come from the model-view-controller architecture around which the new components are built. There is so much functionality available from the Swing text components and so many ways to customize them that a whole book could be devoted to the subject. In this chapter, the first of five that discuss the text components, you'll first see an overview of the new text controls. After this introductory material, some of which should already be familiar to you, you'll see how to add new functionality to the simpler text components (JText-Field, JPasswordField, and JTextArea) by subclassing them, by creating new model classes, and by plugging in custom components, such as a new cursor.