David Anderson

If you haven't tried it yet, Swing is Good. For those of us who've had to wrestle with the java.awt to build GUIs, Swing is a much simpler and more powerful alternative. With its "coming soon" status in the com.sun.java.swing classes in JFC 1.0 upgraded to "officially blessed into Java" as javax.swing in JDK 1.2, Java application developers everywhere should be pleased. Although it's only a Java extension and not part of the core library, we should be fine since right now we really don't need GUI support for doorbells, toasters or electric frying pans. For general Java programming, Swing works pretty well out of the box. Text fields, text areas, buttons, labels, lists and trees cover a large majority of what the average GUI developer needs. However, for harder-core development, Swing still needs some customization. I'm an infrastructural programmer at heart; every t... (more)