Introduction
AWT
Swing
Containers
  Demo 1
UI Components
  Demo 2
UI Layout
  Demo 3   Demo 4
Text Display
  Demo 5
Drawing
  Demo 6   Demo 7
Draw Polygons
  Demo 8   Demo 9
Colors
Text Draw 
  Demo 10
Images
  Demo 11
Exercises

Container components can, as the name implies, hold other components. The sub-components can themselves be containers or they can be atomic components that serve a single purpose such as a label or button.

So-called top level containers include JApplet, JFrame, and JDialog. These are never held inside other containers.

JApplet extends the Applet class as shown by this diagram:

java.lang.Object
   |
   +--java.awt.Component
         |
         +--java.awt.Container
               |
               +--java.awt.Panel
                     |
                     +--java.applet.Applet
                           |
                           +--javax.swing.JApplet

The following example illustrates the essentials of creating an instance of JApplet:

The steps to creating a Swing interface are not so different from the AWT (see Chapter 6: Supplements). Instances of individual components are created and then added to a container.

One difference, however, is that instead of adding directly to the applet's Panel container as in the AWT approach, we instead add to the Content Pane object belonging to the JApplet instance.

The top-level Swing containers - JFrame, JApplet, JDialog, JWindow - are conceptually constructed of several such panes:

The pane layers in the Swing frame.
(From the JavaSoft Tutorial)

The panes organize the display of the components, the interception of events, z-ordering of components, and various other tasks. If you ever want to build a custom component, it is necessary to understand the details of all this. However, for most GUI building you only need to deal with the ContentPane, to which you add components, including those such as JPanel that can contain other components.

Note: For J2SE 5.0, calling getContentPane() is no longer required for Swing components. This was accomplished by enhancing the add(), remove(), and setLayout() methods so that they forward all calls to the content pane automatically for the JFrame, JDialog, JWindow, JApplet and JInternalFrame components.

In the above example, you would thus only need to invoke add (button) to place the button on the applet panel. For many of our examples we continue to use the content pane explicitly so that the codes will work with earlier compilers. For the exercises the student can use the J2SE5.0 approach if desired.

For details on the layered construction of the top level containers, see these sections of the Sun Java Tutorial:

References and Web Resources

• Swing Components and the Containment Hierarchy
• Using Top-Level Containers
• How to Use RootPanes

Latest update: Oct.25, 2004

            Tech
Java Tech Graphics
Starting to Plot
  Demo 1
Drawing Panel
  Demo 2
Histogram Display
  Demo 3
Exercises

           Physics
Display Text Data
  Demo 1
Plot Data
  Demo 2
Find Max/Min
  Demo 3
Exercises