Swing Hacks

Display Dates in a Custom Calendar #4

Chapter 1, Basic JComponents

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19

HACK

The best thing about these image-based borders is that you can completely

change their look by just dropping in new images, which is easy to do with

the slice tool in Photoshop. When you create your own image borders, I rec-

ommend starting with a rectangular shape layer and then using filters and

effects to create drop shadows, bevels, and stroked borders.

H A C K

#4

Display Dates in a Custom Calendar Hack #4

You can download calendar components from third parties, but real hackers

can use Swing to build a custom calendar widget on their own.

When you design an application, you’ll often want to use standard widgets

to display information. Swing doesn’t always give you what you need,

though. Consider the calendar component: Swing doesn’t come with one, so

most users have to download widgets to integrate into their application.

However, why not go with a cool and hip teen-friendly application with an

attractive, image-based component, as shown in Figure 1-15?

That would be a bit more fun, wouldn’t it? This hack will show you how to

build a completely custom calendar component using

java.util.Calendar

and a few images.

First, consider what you’ll need. You’ve got to have pretty images, a compo-

nent to paint them on, and then some logic to handle the different parts of

the date, including what day of the week starts off the current month. You

should also provide a

setDate( ) method, so that MVC frameworks can play

well with your calendar. Let’s get started.

Figure 1-15. Custom calendar component