Java GUI Swing Model Explanation

Question

I\'ve been working with Swing for a while now but the whole model/structure of JFrames, paint(), super, etc is all murky in my mind. I nee

Answer 1

If, after reading the Swing tutorial, you find your interest lies in more advanced topics, you may also wish to look at Swing Second Edition by Robinson and Vorobiev.

Answer 2

Filthy Rich Clients by Chet Haase and Romain Guy is a great book about Java UI. It covers some more advanced stuff too, but introduction and few first chapters explain fundamental things well.

Answer 3

Have you looked at the Java Swing Tutorial (click here)? It does a pretty good job of covering the basics of developing Swing applications.

Answer 4

I found Swing Explorer to be a precious tool to understand the hierarchy of components (particularly in complex GUIs) and look at properties (alas, read-only: we get used to Firebug convenience!). It has an Eclipse plugin.

Answer 5

I've found that simply browsing around in the source code (ctrl-click on a name if you're using NetBeans) has been really helpful. If I see a method appear in the completion dialog that I'm not familiar with, I'll just click "Go to source" and look around until I'm comfortable with it.

Answer 6

The same happened to me. Actually to this day I don't quite get 100% how all it works.

Swing is a very flexible framework - perhaps too flexible. With flexibility comes a lot of abstraction and with abstraction comes confusion. :)

I've found the following articles worth reading. They helped me to better understand the big picture of Swing.

• A Swing Architecture Overview

• The process of installing a UI delegate, which is just this image:

They explain quite well how the model and the delegate work. It always drives me mad when I see those JLabel, LabelUI, ui.update, etc.