jfc-swing

Digging through my Mac laptop, I just found the old Tame Swing files laying around. These examples are a little old now, but I think they are great examples of the power of the Java Swing framework. Since they are hard to find on the internet I've gathered them into a little collection here.

Currently I just have the Java source code files there, but give me a couple of days and I'll see what I can do to get some of the examples running, and maybe include some screen shots there as well.

As I've started to work on designing an HTML editor I'd like for the Mac platform, a little irony has set in: I find that I don't want to write it in Objective C. Given my history with Java, I find that I don't want to be tied to one platform, even Mac OS X. What if I install Ubuntu later this week (as scheduled) and fall madly in love with it? I want my application to work there also.

Question: How do I set my Java/Swing application to use the native look and feel of the platform it is running on?

Answer: Use the Java UIManager class to set the look and feel properly, like this:

UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName());

Note that the setLookAndFeel method can throw an UnsupportedLookAndFeelException exception that you should handle.

Someone asked yesterday if you can use animated GIF images in Java applications using the JFC/Swing toolkit. That's something I hadn't tried with Java and Swing before, so I wrote a quick test program, and sure enough they work.

I just load an animated GIF as an ImageIcon, then put it on a JLabel and display it on a JFrame, and the animation starts right up. Note that I'm using a Java/JDK 1.4.x release.

Here's another one of those postings that are just here to help my bad memory. I currently travel a fair amount, work on different systems and projects, and can't remember the Java syntax for adding a Java ActionListener to a JButton, so here's a little sample code to help me remember: