Using Other Swing Features

This lesson contains a collection of how-to pages to help you use miscellaneous Swing features.
How to Use Actions

With Action objects, you can coordinate the state and event handling of two or more components that generate action events. For example, you can use a single Action to create and coordinate a tool-bar button and a menu item that perform the same function.

How to Support Assistive Technologies

Swing components have built-in support for assistive technologies. Your program can provide even better support by following a few rules.

How to Use Borders

Borders are very handy for drawing lines, titles, and empty space around the edges of components.. (You might have noticed that the examples in this trail use a lot of borders.) This section tells you how to add a border to any JComponent.

How to Use Icons

Many Swing components can display icons. Generally, icons are implemented as instances of the ImageIcon class.

How to Set the Look and Feel

You have the option of specifying the look and feel of your Swing components.

How to Use Threads

Read this section if you need access to the GUI from any thread except the event-dispatching thread. This section explains how to use methods such as invokeLater, and classes such as SwingWorker. It also tells you when you might want to use the Timer class.

How to Use Timers

With the Timer class, you can implement a thread that performs an action after a delay, and optionally continues to repeat the action.

Using Other Swing Features