Twelve years ago drawing lines, texts and pictures was pretty hot stuff. Today users expect more. Modern applications have dialog boxes, menus, radio buttons, scroll bars, checkboxes, tool palettes, hot tips and more. Java provides premade components to implement many of these more modern application features. These include buttons, checkboxes, scrollbars, list boxes, pop-up menus and more.
Collectively these user interface items are called widgets. In Java widgets are all subclasses of java.awt.Component and are also called Components. And although there arenšt any premade widgets to implement some of the more modern user interface elements like hot tips or floating palettes, youšll see how to use the basic classes to roll your own.
In This Chapter You Will Learn