Swing Hacks

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Preface

Why Swing Hacks?

The term hacking has a bad reputation in the press. They use it to refer to

people who break into systems or wreak havoc with computers as their

weapon. Among people who write code, though, the term hack refers to a

quick-and-dirty solution to a problem, or a clever way to get something

done. And the term hacker is taken very much as a compliment, referring to

someone as being creative, having the technical chops to get things done.

The Hacks series is an attempt to reclaim the word, document the good

ways people are hacking, and pass the hacker ethic of creative participation

on to the uninitiated. Seeing how others approach systems and problems is

often the quickest way to learn about a new technology.

In the short term, we hope this book will show you how to do fun things

that will enhance your own applications directly. Some are visual enhance-

ments to make your software look better. Some are functional improve-

ments to make your software do something it couldn’t do before. Some are

even just plain silly, in print only to prove it could be done. Whatever your

interest, we hope you will find both better ways of doing old things and

learn something new about techniques you never even thought of.

In the long term, we hope this book will give you a small glimpse of the

applications coming in the future. This year (2005) we hope will be a water-

shed year for Java on the desktop. Users are demanding more advanced user

interfaces than the Web can provide, and Java is poised to provide them.

New technology is streaming into the Java community at a blistering rate,

and it gives application developers a whole new set of blocks to play with.

This is important because we are going to need these new technologies.

New desktop software promises greater integration between the Web, exter-

nal devices, and software sitting right on your desktop. RSS readers and

iPods. iTunes and photo collaboration. Gaming on desktops, servers, and

cell phones; all at the same time. This is the future of desktop software.

Swing is just a small part of desktop Java, but we feel it is the focal point—

the place where desktop technology (AWT, Java2D, JavaSound), network

technology (web services, XML, JXTA), and device technology (iPods, cell

phones, TVs) all converge upon Java. Many of the hacks in this book are not

strictly about Swing, but about using Swing to do cool things with the rest of

the world. And it’s more than just “cool”—animation is a powerful way to

show a change in content or context, and sound can get the user’s attention

when he or she is away from the keyboard. These features are important

parts of delivering user-centric, quality desktop applications.