How are Swing components internally created, laid out, repainted, notified of events, ...?

Question

Hello!

I wonder if there's a good documentation (or a (viewable) ebook) about the lifecycle of Swing components.

Is "lifecycle" the correct term, anyway?

I hope to find answers to question such as:

• How, when, in which order painting methods are called?
• How, when, which events are called by whom?
• What is the exact sequence of method calls for component creation?

From time to time I encounter strange behavior of my apps, for example:

• ComponentListener's resize event is called before setVisible(true)
  (so that root pane has negative dimensions!)
• Some components are laid out correctly only after resizing the JFrame by hand
• Changing a super class from JPanel to JLayeredPane causes my class to be laid out differently inside an other container.
• And lot of other strange things...

Answer 1

I've had good experiences with the O'Reilly Swing book; if you want, you can use the free trial of the Safari Books Online to get access to the whole book.

Answer 2

I had the same question long ago.

I can't believe how hard is to find a good resource about this topic in the internet.

Fortunately I've found this link and now I have it in my bookmark with golden tag. :)

A Swing Architecture Overview

Once you have a good grasp of how they work conceptually you will be able to fix most of the problems you mention.

I hope it helps.

Answer 3

FilthyRichClients is a good resource to understand some of the concepts above, especially chapter two which covers:

• Swing Rendering Fundamentals
• Events
• Swing Painting
• Swing Rendering
• Double-Buffering
• Threading

The website is here:

http://filthyrichclients.org/

and you can get the book on Amazon or O-Reilly Safari also...

Answer 4

The best source of documentation for Swing is the source code (src.zip in your JDK). Unfortunately you really need to look into it to understand what it's up to.