Swing

Many new features have been added to Swing:

• The spinner component is a single line input field that enables the user to select a number or a value by cycling through a sequence of values with a tiny pair of up/down arrow buttons.

• The new formatted text field component allows formatting of dates, numbers, and strings, such as a text field that accepts only decimal currency values.

• A new drag-and-drop architecture provides seamless drag-and-drop support between components as well as an easy way to implement drag-and-drop in your customized Swing components. You need only to write a couple of methods that describe the particulars of your data model.

Several features have been enhanced in Swing:

• The progress bar component has been enhanced to support an indeterminate state. Rather than showing the degree of completeness, the indeterminate progress bar uses constant animation to show that a time-consuming operation is occurring.

• The tabbed pane component has been enhanced to support scrollable tabs. With this feature enabled, if all the tabs cannot fit within a single tab run, the tabbed pane component displays a single, scrollable run of tabs instead of wrapping the tabs onto multiple runs.

• The popup and popup factory classes, which were previously package private, have been exposed and made public so that developers can customize or create their own popups.

• The new focus architecture is fully integrated into Swing.

For more information, see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/guide/swing/SwingChanges.html.