Sun Ships Swing 1.0

By Mark Andrews

This issue of The Swing Connection  celebrates the official release of JFC 1.1, informally known as Swing  1.0.

Jon Kannegaard, vice president of software products at JavaSoft business  unit of Sun Microsystems, Inc., announced the release of JFC 1.1. He said:

"The Java^TM Foundation  Classes usher in a new era in Java software development -- one where developers  can easily create powerful, flexible applications written entirely in  Java with a variety of user interface options."

"The JFC software is a product of intense collaboration by developers  and companies from every corner of the industry," Kannegaard continued.  "We have been thrilled to see countless developers adopt the Java  Foundation Classes as the basis for their Java application development."

Up to now, Kannegaard noted, JFC 1.1 has been available only in the form  of early-access releases that could be downloaded from the Java Developer  Connection.

Sessions focusing on JFC 1.1 and Swing 1.0 will be one of the highlights  of the 1998 JavaOne developers' conference scheduled for March 24 through  March 26 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. For more news  about JavaOne -- the largest single-location developers' conference in  the computer industry -- see the archived article titled "On  the Swing Track at JavaOne."

Swing is an informal name for a set of Java GUI classes that extend the  power and versatility of the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT), an older  set of GUI tools that's familiar to developers who work in the Java^TM programming  language.

(To find out how Swing got its name, see the box in the "Introducing Swing" article.  If you're not quite sure what Swing is, read the whole article.)

Swing does not replace the AWT toolkit, but exends it by adding many  new classes and a host of new features. For example, Swing components  have a pluggable look-and-feel (PL&F) architecture (see "Introducing  Swing") that gives developers two important new benefits:

• It lets them create "Write Once, Run Anywhere^TM" GUI components that automatically  take on the correct look and feel of whatever operating system they  are running under. Swing, written completely in Java^TM, performs this magic without using  any code supplied by the operating system under which its is running.  Alternatively, you can always use Swing's cross-platform L&F, the  Java^TM Look and  Feel (previously code-named Metal), no matter what platform you're using.  (To learn more about the Java look-and-feel, see the article on that topic  in this issue.)
• Swing gives developers the power to create customized components for  their applications. Some corporate developers are already using Swing  to build individual corporate themes into the GUI components used in  their applications. Articles showing exactly how you can create your  own custom look-and-feel implementations will be published in upcoming  issues of The Swing Connection.

Along with Swing, JFC 1.1 includes an Accessibility  API that provides support for people with disabilities. The Accessiblity  API provides assistive technologies such as screen readers, screen magnifiers,  and speech recognition. Development of this API followed an open-design  process that based on input from experts in the assistive-technologies  field.

Even though JFC 1.1 (Swing 1.0) brings a host of benefits to developers,  that's just the beginning. There's more ahead in JDK 1.2, including:

• A 2D  API, which supplies Java applications with many different paint  styles, mechanisms for defining complex shapes, and classes and methods  for fine-tuning the rendering process.
• A Drag and  Drop API, which lets the user drag and drop objects from one application  to another, even when other applications involved in the process are  not written in the Java programming language.

The Swing Connection will be publishing major articles about both of  these APIs in upcoming issues.