Chapter 14. The Swing Components and Event Handling

Chapter 14. The Swing Components and Event Handling

Terms you'll need to understand:

• Layout manager

• Pane

• Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern

• Container

• Component

Techniques you'll need to master:

• Taking advantage of the plug-and-play architecture

• Selecting the proper components for an effective interface

• Placing components in a container and resizing them

• Using event handlers to respond to user input, such as mouse clicks and keystrokes

• Understanding the Model-View-Controller architecture behind some of the components

In this chapter, you review the basics of Java Swing architecture and individual components as well as Java's user interface capabilities. The user interface is worth about one-third of the exam score, so you want to make sure the layout is clean and each input component is labeled.

Chapter 13, "The GUI," reviewed user interface principles and techniques, with a general discussion about making screens useful. Chapter 15, "The JTable Component," covers the JTable, the most important Swing component for this certification. In this chapter, you apply what you learned in Chapter 13 to a variety of Swing components; you will use many of them in your project.

To meet the assignment's requirements, you need to understand what containers and components to use for your application. The core of the graphical user interface (GUI) is Java's Swing components. This chapter briefly covers most of the components you need for your GUI and includes many code snippets to demonstrate the key lines of code you might find useful for your project.