How to make my GUI work

Question

Can anyone tell me on how the swing components drawn from the palette and put into the Jfame can work together? For example If a button pressed can the result show on the textArea, Or Can I drag some listed objects from the Jlist in my JFrame onto the JtextArea/JTabpanel?

Thank you!

Answer 1

You will need to add an ActionListener to your button and in the actionPerformed method you can write the code to display a result in your JTextArea: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/events/actionlistener.html

More info on buttons: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/components/button.html

You can drag objects from a JList to another component (such as a JTextArea or JTable), but you would probably not drag them directly onto a JTabbedPane. You'll have to code this behavior with the DnD API: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/dnd/intro.html

Answer 2

Rob has a pretty good answer.

Here's my 2 cents,

"For example If a button pressed can the result show on the textArea"

If you are using Netbeans, this is pretty quick and easy to do:

1. Double click your button.

   The IDE will jump to the actionPerformed method. (and put in the required boiler-plate code)

2. Place your code in the generated actionPerfored method

   e.g "jTextArea1.setText("hello world");"

I'd advise reading the swing tutorial on the sun website:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/