Swing components & MVC Architecture

Swing Components1. What are Swing Components

2. Top Level Containers

3. General Purpose Containers

4. Basic Controls

5. Uneditable Information Displays

6. Interactive Displays of Highly Formatted Information

* Swing components are basic building blocks of an application. * Swing has a wide range of various components, including buttons, check boxes, sliders, and list boxes.

1. What are Swing Components

1. Top Level Containers* Every program with a Swing GUI must contain at least one top-level Swing

container that provides the support that Swing components need to perform their painting and event handling.

* Swing provides three generally useful top-level container classes:

1. JFrame 2. JDialog 3. JApplet.

* Each JFrame object implements a single main window, and each JDialog implements a secondary window (a window that's dependent on another window). Each JApplet object implements an applet's display area within a browser window.

When using these classes, you should keep these facts in mind:

• To appear onscreen, every GUI component must be part of a containment hierarchy. Each containment hierarchy has a top-level container as its root.

• Each top-level container has a content pane that, generally speaking, contains the visible components in that top-level container's GUI.

• You can optionally add a menu bar to a top-level container. The menu bar is positioned within the top-level container, but outside the content pane.

Here's a picture of a frame created by an application. The frame contains a green menu bar (with no menus) and, in the frame's content pane, a large blank, yellow label.

• The SourceOf previous example

2. General Purpose Containers

1. Typically used to collect Basic Controls (JButton, JChoiceBox…)

2. Added to layout of top-level containers

JPanel

JFrame

3. Basic Controls

4. Uneditable Information Displays

5. Interactive Displays of Highly Formatted Information

MVC Architecture