4.1. Textual Interfaces

Our example application provided a text-based, character-mode interface that was displayed to the terminal device from which the program was launched. This type of interface is one of the easiest to whip up during development, and also can be of aid in debugging because you can sprinkle println()s throughout your code.

Java has had a graphical user interface, in the form of the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT), since JDK 1.0. This user interface was then greatly enhanced and expanded with the introduction of Java Foundation Classes (JFC) in JDK 1.2. But beginning in Java 2 SDK 1.4, Java also supports “headless” implementations of the SDK, which means that vendors that do not typically support graphical interfaces (such ...

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