Hour 13. Building a Simple User Interface

Because of the popularity of Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh systems, computer users have come to expect certain things from their software. It should feature a graphical user interface, take user input from a mouse, and work like other programs. These expectations are a far cry from the heyday of MS-DOS and other command-line systems, when the user interface varied greatly with each program you used, and point-and-click was something photographers did. Programs that use a graphical user interface and mouse control are called windowing software. Although you probably have been using a command-line interface to write Java programs, during this hour you create windowing programs using a group of classes called Swing. The following topics will be covered:

• Using user interface components such as buttons
• Using labels, text fields, and other components
• Grouping components together
• Putting components inside other components
• Opening and closing windows
• Testing an interface