GUI Extra Section

As well as the aforementioned GUI objects, JButton and JTextField, there are many other great components that can be used easily. In a bid to save the trees, however, we are only going to list the most useful ones here, and as a bonus, we have included a chapter on the companion CD that will give an example of each GUI object and explain how each works. This chapter can be found in the Bonus Chapter folder on the CD-ROM.

Here is a complete list of the Swing components covered in this bonus chapter.

Component	What it is/does
JLabel	Used to display static text
JButton	Seen in the previous example and used to create buttons
JTextField	Again seen previously. Used to take keyboard input from the user
JPasswordField	Same as a JTextField, but the visible input is replaced by asterisks (*)
JTextArea	A component to display (or input) a large volume of text
JComboBox	Used to give a drop-down menu of a defined list of options
JCheckBox	Used for Boolean options (i.e., if some feature should be enabled or disabled)
JRadioButton	Used to create a list of selectable options in which only a single option can be picked
JProgressBar	A bar used to show progress to the user
JList	Used to display a list of data
JTable	Used to contain tabulated data. We will also see this being used in Chapter 16.
JTree	Used to display hierarchical information, such as the directory structure
JEditorPane	Can be used to contain HTML pages, as you will see in the bonus chapter example on the companion CD.
JOptionPane	Used to create message boxes that pop up to display simple information to the user. We have seen some of these already, such as in Chapter 9 when choosing whether to go into full-screen or windowed mode.
JMenu	Used to create a menu at the top of your application
Tool Tips	Those little pop-up thingies that tell you what a button does