AWT - Overview

Graphical User Interface

Graphical User Interface (GUI) offers user interaction via some graphical components. For example our underlying Operating System also offers GUI via window,frame,Panel, Button, Textfield, TextArea, Listbox, Combobox, Label, Checkbox etc. These all are known as components. Using these components we can create an interactive user interface for an application.

AWT Environment Setup

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.

AWT Controls

Every user interface considers the following three main aspects:

• UI elements : Thes are the core visual elements the user eventually sees and interacts with. GWT provides a huge list of widely used and common elements varying from basic to complex which we will cover in this tutorial.
  

AWT Event Handling

What is an Event?

Change in the state of an object is known as event i.e. event describes the change in state of source. Events are generated as result of user interaction with the graphical user interface components.

AWT Event Classes

The Event classes represent the event. Java provides us various Event classes but we will discuss those which are more frequently used.

AWT Event Listeners

The Event listener represent the interfaces responsible to handle events. Java provides us various Event listener classes but we will discuss those which are more frequently used. Every method of an event listener method has a single argument as an object which is subclass of EventObject class.

AWT Event Adapters

Adapters are abstract classes for receiving various events. The methods in these classes are empty. These classes exists as convenience for creating listener objects.

AWT Layouts

Introduction

Layout means the arrangement of components within the container. In other way we can say that placing the components at a particular position within the container. The task of layouting the controls is done automatically by the Layout Manager.

AWT Containers

Containers are integral part of AWT GUI components. A container provides a space where a component can be located. A Container in AWT is a component itself and it adds the capability to add component to itself. Following are noticable points to be considered.

AWT Menu Classes

As we know that every top-level window has a menu bar associated with it. This menu bar consist of various menu choices available to the end user. Further each choice contains list of options which is called drop down menus. Menu and MenuItem controls are subclass of MenuComponent class.

AWT Graphics Classes

Graphics controls allows application to draw onto the component or on image.

Graphics Controls

AWT - Useful Resources

The following resources contain additional information on AWT. Please use them to get more in-depth knowledge on this topic.

Discuss AWT

JAVA provides a rich set of libraries to create Graphical User Interface in platform independent way. In this article we'll look in AWT (Abstract Window Toolkit).