Building GUIs with Java™™ and Swing (*S)

The Java™ Swing windowing toolkit is a major advance on the original Java AWT system, giving much more flexibility and allowing more visually pleasing and user-friendly applications to be created. This course aims to acquaint students with the enormous wealth of user interface tools Swing provides, and to describe the architectural framework behind them. Many examples and tips are provided to enable use of both the simple and complex tools.

A sound knowledge of the Java language is essential, including AWT and events. An understanding of multi-threaded programming would be helpful. A reasonably comprehensive Java programming course should be a provide sufficient background, providing the student has previous programming experience.

On completion of this course, the student should be able to

• Outline the Swing components
• Describe the advantages and disadvantages of using Swing
• Effectively use the Swing tools
• Understand the Model-View-Controller architecture
• Use the Swing components that rely on this architecture

This course may prove useful to people such as:

• Experienced Java programmers familiar with AWT but not Swing
• Those learning Java programming, who have completed training in the main features of the language

Further knowledge and experience of C++ programming can be gained by studying:

• Java 2 Advanced Programming

3 Days

Instructor-led course, with many practical computer-based exercises.

• Introduction
  • What is Swing
  • What Swing provides
  • Swing availability
• Review
  • Event handling
  • Basic AWT components
  • Containers and layout managers
• Basic Swing Components
  • Labels
  • Progress bars
  • Tool tips
  • Buttons
  • Checkboxes and radio buttons
  • Text fields
  • Lists
  • Combo boxs
  • Sliders
• Changing Appearances
  • Look and feel
  • Borders
  • Text and image positioning
  • Changing keyboard traversal order
• Swing Containers
  • Panels
  • Frames
  • Dialogs
  • Scrollable panels
  • Viewports
  • Tabbed panels
  • Internal frames
  • File and colour choosers
• Complex Components
  • Model-View-Controller architecture
  • Tables
  • Trees
  • Creating a data source
  • Content change events
• Advanced Components
  • Handling custom content
  • Creating new cell viewers
  • Creating new cell editors
  • Sharing data sources amongst views
• Text Components
  • Text component architecture
  • The document interface
  • Undo and redo
  • Document events
• Swing and Threading
  • Swing threading model
  • Scheduling ascynchronous Swing actions

Any machine with JDK™ (Java Development Kit) version 1.2 or later. Integrated development environment preferable.