Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

22.1 Introduction

In this chapter, we continue our study of Swing GUIs. We discuss additional components and layout managers and lay the groundwork for building more complex GUIs. We begin with sliders for selecting from a range of integer values, then discuss additional details of windows. Next, you’ll use menus to organize an application’s commands.

The look-and-feel of a Swing GUI can be uniform across all platforms on which a Java program executes, or the GUI can be customized by using Swing’s pluggable look-and-feel (PLAF). We provide an example that illustrates how to change between Swing’s default metal look-and-feel (which looks and behaves the same across platforms), the Nimbus look-and-feel (introduced in Chapter 12), a look-and-feel ...