Swing Components

• We've already covered a few, but let's review them, starting with JPanels and JFrames.
• These two Swing components are very similar.  Both are containers of other components.
• A JFrame is basically a window.  It has a title bar, maximize, restore, and minimize options.  You can disable these if you want.
• A JPanel is simply a container.  It is more of a virtual container than a JFrame. You can nest panels (add panels to panel) within each other, and assign unique layouts to each panel.
• Both JPanels and JFrames have layout managers.  JFrames default to BorderLayout, and JPanels default to FlowLayout.  But of course, you can change these.
• Though they are invisible to the end user, JPanels have many uses.
• Perhaps their biggest use is in nesting layout managers.
• Also, consider layout managers like BorderLayout and GridLayout where you can only put one component in a region or cell.  What if you want to put three JButtons or three RadioButtons in a single cell?  You first put a JPanel in the region or cell.  This counts as your one component.  Then, you can set that JPanel to a FlowLayout, which can take mutiple components, and add your buttons to that panel.
• You can use the setLayout(LayoutManager m) method of most containers to set the layout that you wish to use.  Or, even better, just do it graphically in Forte'.


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Created by:  Brandan Jones January 4, 2002