Java™ How to Program, Seventh Edition

22.1. Introduction

In this chapter, we continue our study of GUIs. We discuss additional components and layout managers and lay the groundwork for building more complex GUIs.

We begin our discussion with menus that enable the user to effectively perform tasks in the program. 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), a look-and-feel that simulates Motif (a popular UNIX look-and-feel) and one that simulates Microsoft’s Windows look-and-feel.

Many of today’s applications ...