AWT

Changes to the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) package center on improving the robustness, behavior, and performance of programs that present a graphical user interface. Improvements include the following:

• A new focus architecture replaces the previous implementation and addresses many focus-related bugs that were caused by platform inconsistencies, and incompatibilities between AWT and Swing components.

• The new full-screen exclusive mode API supports high-performance graphics by suspending the windowing system so that drawing can be rendered directly to the screen. This capacity benefits applications such as games, or other rendering-intensive applications.

• Headless support is now enabled by new graphics environment methods that indicate whether a display, keyboard, and mouse can be supported in a graphics environment.

• The ability to disable native frame decorations is now available for applications that need complete control of the specification of a frame's appearance. When enabled, it prevents the rendering of a native title bar, system menu, border, or other native screen components.

• The mouse wheel, with a scroll wheel in place of the middle mouse button, is enabled with new built-in Java support for scrolling with the mouse wheel. Also, a new mouse wheel listener class allows customization of mouse wheel behavior.

• The AWT package has been modified to be fully 64-bit compliant and now runs on Solaris machines with 64-bit and 32-bit addresses.