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Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java Contents | Prev | Next List boxes are significantly different from Choice boxes, and not just in appearance. While a Choice box drops down when you activate it, a List occupies some fixed number of lines on a screen all the time and doesn’t change. In addition, a List allows […]

Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java Contents | Prev | Next For safety’s sake, applets are quite restricted and there are many things you can’t do. You can generally answer the question of what an applet is able to do by looking at what it is supposed to do: extend the functionality of a Web page […]

Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java Contents | Prev | Next Like a group of radio buttons, a drop-down list is a way to force the user to select only one element from a group of possibilities. However, it’s a much more compact way to accomplish this, and it’s easier to change the elements of the […]

Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java Contents | Prev | Next The concept of a radio button in GUI programming comes from pre-electronic car radios with mechanical buttons: when you push one in, any other button that was pressed pops out. Thus it allows you to force a single choice among many. The AWT does not […]

Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java Contents | Prev | Next A check box provides a way to make a single on-off choice; it consists of a tiny box and a label. The box typically holds a little ‘x’ (or some other indication that it is set) or is empty depending on whether that item was […]

Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java Contents | Prev | Next A Label does exactly what it sounds like it should: places a label on the form. This is particularly important for text fields and text areas that don’t have labels of their own, and can also be useful if you simply want to place textual […]

Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java Contents | Prev | Next A TextArea is like a TextField except that it can have multiple lines and has significantly more functionality. In addition to what you can do with a TextField, you can append text and insert or replace text at a given location. It seems like this […]

Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java Contents | Prev | Next A TextField is a one line area that allows the user to enter and edit text. TextField is inherited from TextComponent, which lets you select text, get the selected text as a String, get or set the text, and set whether the TextField is editable, […]

Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java Contents | Prev | Next You’ll notice that if you compile and run the applet above, nothing happens when you press the buttons. This is where you must step in and write some code to determine what will happen. The basis of event-driven programming, which comprises a lot of what […]

Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java Contents | Prev | Next Making a button is quite simple: you just call the Button constructor with the label you want on the button. (You can also use the default constructor if you want a button with no label, but this is not very useful.) Usually you’ll want to […]

Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java Contents | Prev | Next Libraries are often grouped according to their functionality. Some libraries, for example, are used as is, off the shelf. The standard Java library String and Vector classes are examples of these. Other libraries are designed specifically as building blocks to build other classes. A certain […]

Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java Contents | Prev | Next One of the problems with the “old” AWT that you’ll learn about in this chapter is that it is a poor example of both object-oriented design and GUI development kit design. It throws us back into the dark ages of programming (some suggest that the […]