Chapter 6.1.4 – Some Java GUI History | Introduction to Programming Using Java

Chapter 6.1.4 – Some Java GUI History | Introduction to Programming Using Java

6.1.4 Some Java GUI History

The original GUI toolkit for Java was the AWT, the “Abstract Windowing Toolkit.” It provided a common interface to the GUI components already built into various operating systems. At the very beginning, it used a simpler event model that did not require listener objects, but that model was abandoned in favor of listeners very quickly in Java 1.1.

When Java was first introduced, one of the important applications was applets. An applet is a GUI program that can run on a web page in a web browser. Applets were covered in previous versions of this textbook, but they have become much less widely used and have been dropped from this seventh edition of the book.

The Swing GUI toolkit was introduced in Java 1.2 as an improved alternative to the AWT, with a larger variety of sophisticated components and a more logical structure. Although Swing uses some aspects of the AWT, most of its components are written in Java rather than being based on operating system components. Swing has been the standard toolkit for writing GUI programs in Java for over ten years, and it is the toolkit that I cover in this book.

More recently, however, another GUI toolkit called JavaFX has been introduced. It uses many of the same core ideas as Swing, including components, layout, and events, but uses a different structure for its applications and a different set of classes.

With Java 8, JavaFX becomes the preferred approach to writing GUI applications. However, I do not cover JavaFX in this book. JavaFX is compatible with Swing and can use Swing components, and Swing will continue to be supported in Java. (Indeed, the AWT is still supported!) And as I’ve said, JavaFX is built on the same core ideas as Swing.

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Introduction to Programming Using Java – David J. Eck

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Chapter 6 – Introduction to GUI Programming | Introduction to Programming Using Java