Chapter 11. Building Simple User Interfaces for Applets

With the popularity of Apple's Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems, most of today's computer users expect their software to feature a graphical user interface and things they can control with a mouse. In the workplace, the right to point-and-click ranks up there with life, liberty, and the pursuit of a good 401(k) plan.

These software amenities are user-friendly but programmer-unfriendly in many languages. Writing windowing software can be one of the more challenging tasks for a novice developer.

Fortunately, Java has simplified the process with the Abstract Windowing Toolkit, a set of classes for the creation and usage of graphical user interfaces.

Today you'll use the toolkit ...

Get Sams Teach Yourself Java™ 2 Platform in 21 Days Professional Reference Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.