SWING - Quick Guide

SWING - Overview

Swing API is set of extensible GUI Components to ease developer's life to create JAVA based Front End/ GUI Applications. It is build upon top of AWT API and acts as replacement of AWT API as it has almost every control corresponding to AWT controls.
Swing component follows a Model-View-Controller architecture to fulfill the following criterias.

• A single API is to be sufficient to support multiple look and feel.
• API is to model driven so that highest level API is not required to have the data.
• API is to use the Java Bean model so that Builder Tools and IDE can provide better services to the developers to use it.

MVC Architecture

Swing API architecture follows loosely based MVC architecture in the following manner.

• A Model represents component's data.
• View represents visual representation of the component's data.
• Controller takes the input from the user on the view and reflects the changes in Component's data.
• Swing component have Model as a seperate element and View and Controller part are clubbed in User Interface elements. Using this way, Swing has pluggable look-and-feel architecture.

Swing features

• Light Weight - Swing component are independent of native Operating System's API as Swing API controls are rendered mostly using pure JAVA code instead of underlying operating system calls.
• Rich controls - Swing provides a rich set of advanced controls like Tree, TabbedPane, slider, colorpicker, table controls
• Highly Customizable - Swing controls can be customized in very easy way as visual apperance is independent of internal representation.
• Pluggable look-and-feel- SWING based GUI Application look and feel can be changed at run time based on available values.

SWING - Environment

This section guides you on how to download and set up Java on your machine. Please follow the following steps to set up the environment.
Java SE is freely available from the link Download Java. So you download a version based on your operating system.
Follow the instructions to download java and run the .exe to install Java on your machine. Once you installed Java on your machine, you would need to set environment variables to point to correct installation directories:

Setting up the path for windows 2000/XP:

Assuming you have installed Java in c:\Program Files\java\jdk directory:

• Right-click on 'My Computer' and select 'Properties'.
• Click on the 'Environment variables' button under the 'Advanced' tab.
• Now alter the 'Path' variable so that it also contains the path to the Java executable. Example, if the path is currently set to 'C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32', then change your path to read 'C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32;c:\Program Files\java\jdk\bin'.

Setting up the path for windows 95/98/ME:

Assuming you have installed Java in c:\Program Files\java\jdk directory:

• Edit the 'C:\autoexec.bat' file and add the following line at the end:
  'SET PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files\java\jdk\bin'

Setting up the path for Linux, UNIX, Solaris, FreeBSD:

Environment variable PATH should be set to point to where the java binaries have been installed. Refer to your shell documentation if you have trouble doing this.
Example, if you use bash as your shell, then you would add the following line to the end of your '.bashrc: export PATH=/path/to/java:$PATH'