Core Swing: Advanced Programming

The book zeroes in on two aspects of Swing interfaces. First, there are over 500 pages on optimizing your usage of a variety of Swing text controls. The author provides solutions to mimicking native-style operating system support for data validation, numeric input, and special processing with user input. There's also excellent coverage on the extensive support in Swing for loading and displaying HTML. Sections on extending the Swing table control will let you change how table data is displayed and edited (with coverage of custom renderers and cell editors).

In addition, this book explores features in Swing that allow you to carry out advanced user interface operations, such as drag-and-drop functionality and undo support. Throughout this text, the author uses short code excerpts that solve problems and showcase brilliant Swing implementations. By concentrating on strategies and solutions, and not just the Swing APIs, the author shows you not only how to solve particular problems but also the underlying Swing design philosophy, so you can take this library even further in your own programs.

If anything, this text proves once and for all that Swing is ready to take on native operating systems like Windows with its support for advanced user features. This book delivers some really valuable and impossible-to-find information for any experienced Java programmer who needs to do more with Swing. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Extending Swing text controls, text wrapping and scrolling, manipulating text documents, input validation, text attributes, highlighters and carets, custom views, Swing HTML support classes, viewing HTML, editor kits, cascading style sheets and Swing, bi-directional text for international applications, advanced table features in Swing, custom table renderers, table editing and cell editors, drag-and-drop support in Swing, drag sources and drop targets, using tree controls for file information, undo support in Swing.