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Chapter 6

Introduction to GUI Programming

Computer users today expect to interact with their computers using a graphical user interface (GUI), and Java can be used to write sophisticated GUI programs.

GUI programs differ from traditional "straight-through" programs that you have encountered in the first few chapters of this book. One big difference is that GUI programs are event-driven. That is, user actions such as clicking on a button or pressing a key on the keyboard generate events, and the program must respond to these events as they occur.

Event-driven programming builds on all the skills you have learned in the first five chapters of this text. You need to be able to write the methods that respond to events. Inside those methods, you are doing the kind of programming-in-the-small that was covered in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. And of course, objects are everywhere in GUI programming. Events are objects. Colors and fonts are objects. GUI components such as buttons and menus are objects. Events are handled by instance methods contained in objects. In Java, GUI programming is object-oriented programming. The purpose of this chapter is, as much as anything, to give you some experience with a large-scale object-oriented API.

This chapter is just an introduction to JavaFX, but it covers the essential features of GUI programming in enough detail to write some interesting programs. The discussion of JavaFX will continue in Chapter 13 with more details and with more advanced techniques, but complete coverage of JavaFX would require an entire book of its own.

Note that JavaFX is not distributed as part of the Java Development Kit. For information about how to obtain JavaFX and how to compile and run programs that use it, see Section 2.6.

This edition of this textbook covers GUI programming using the JavaFX GUI toolkit. An alternative edition covers the Swing GUI toolkit instead of JavaFX. Swing is included as a standard part of Java, so does not require any extra downloads or configuration. The Swing edition can be found at https://math.hws.edu/javanotes9-swing. The only really significant differences between the two editions are in this chapter and in Chapter 13.

Contents of Chapter 6:

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