Java 2D Graphics

1.3. Relatives

The Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) that comes with JDK 1.0 and 1.1 is a large set of classes that encapsulate windows, controls, fonts, images, and drawing. However, the AWT lacks a number of important features, as users of more mature graphics toolkits were quick to point out. Instead of applying a quick fix, the engineers at Sun created the largest, most powerful graphics toolkit yet, the Java Foundation Classes (JFC). JFC is included with Java 2. The 2D API is part of JFC. It is a "core" API, which means that it is present in every implementation of Java 2. It cannot run in older versions of the JDK, however.

To understand how 2D fits into the larger scheme of things, it's helpful to examine how it evolved from AWT. Conceptually, AWT can be split into two pieces: a user interface (UI) toolkit and a drawing toolkit. Between JDK 1.1 and Java 2 (JDK 1.2), these two pieces evolved considerably. The UI toolkit became Swing, and the drawing toolkit became the 2D API.

In this section, I'll explain how Java 2D relates to some other APIs and buzzwords:

Java Foundation Classes (JFC)

Java 2D is one part of JFC. The other parts are AWT, Swing, the Accessibility API, and the Drag and Drop API. See http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/ for details.

AWT

In Java 2, you can use the 2D API to draw on AWT components. AWT is described in books such as John Zukowski's Java AWT Reference (published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.).

Swing

As with AWT components in Java 2, you can ...