JButton & Button ... etc. ?

Hi Experts,

What's the main difference between JButton and Button ? JFrame and Frame ? JLabel and Label ? It seems that JButton, JLabel and JFrame belong to swing and newer .... but .. what are the exact advantages of using them ? Thanks a lot !

LVL 1

meow00Asked: 2004-09-01

Who is Participating?

LVL 1

talvioCommented: 2004-09-01

Button and other GUI components not starting with J are part of AWT (Abstract Windowing Toolkit) which is the original Java GUI component set for Java. It was found to have problems in areas such as performance and flexibility which were then fixed by introducing Swing -components starting with J.

If you are doing desktop develoment I would recommend using Swing, IF there is no need to have backward compatibility to really old JVMs. AWT is still in use in J2ME (micro edition) in embedded devices for example. Swing and AWT should not be used together, although some AWT non-graphical components are used also in Swing.

There is also a commonly used widget set introduced by the eclipse project. I haven't tried it but it should be well worth looking into, if not otherwise atleast for pure interest. SWT (Standard Widget Toolki) and info about it can be found from: http://www.eclipse.org/swt/

br,
-jT

LVL 36

girionisCommented: 2004-09-01

http://bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,26970,00.html

LVL 24

sciuriwareCommented: 2004-09-01

SWING is a way to have components painted to any look and feel, even not provided
by the native platform.
The underlying AWT more or less conforms to the windowmanager program that does all the real painting.

This is just a way to describe it.
The best results come from using SWING with AWT to fill up the holes.
;JOOP!

LVL 92

objectsCommented: 2004-09-01

the swing components (except the top level ones) are lightweight components, whereas the AWT ones are all heavyweights.
Heavyweights having an associated peer component from the native windoiw system.

LVL 92

objectsCommented: 2004-09-01

Swing offers far more functionality than AWT so unless your users don't have Swing support you should use the Swing ones ie. JBlahBlah's

LVL 37

zzynxSoftware engineerCommented: 2004-09-01

Heavy vs. light: the differences

There are some significant differences between lightweight and heavyweight components. And, since all AWT components are heavyweight and all Swing components are lightweight (except for the top-level ones: JWindow, JFrame, JDialog, and JApplet), these differences become painfully apparent when you start mixing Swing components with AWT components.

The differences boil down to the following:

A lightweight component can have transparent pixels; a heavyweight is always opaque.
A lightweight component can appear to be non-rectangular because of its ability to set transparent areas; a heavyweight can only be rectangular.
Mouse events on a lightweight component fall through to its parent; mouse events on a heavyweight component do not fall through to its parent.
When a lightweight component overlaps a heavyweight component, the heavyweight component is always on top, regardless of the relative z-order of the two components.

The above is a quote from this article about mixing heavy and light components: http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/articles/mixing/