Swing OverviewAccording to Encyclopedia Britannica, Swing was a popular music in the United States, circa 1930–1945. Okay, maybe not in the Java sense. Instead, on May 23, 1995, John Gage, then director of the Science Office for Sun, introduced Java to the world. With its birth came something called the Abstract Window Toolkit, or AWT. In turn, with AWT came native widgets, and with this early native widget set came . . . trouble.32638
The original component set that came with the Java platform, AWT, was dependent on too many idiosyncrasies of the underlying platform. Instead of providing a mature-looking component set, Java offered the lowest common denominator version. If a feature wasn’t available on all Java platforms, it wasn’t available on any Java platform. And then you had to deal with all the browser/platform differences. Each Java runtime environment relied on how the component set was connected with the underlying platform-specific native widget set. If there were issues with the connection, first, they were specific to the platform (and/or browser) and second, you had to code around these problems so your programs could be write-once, run anywhere(WORA), the Java mantra of the time.
As Java technologies became more popular, users realized AWT was extremely slow and unreliable, and you couldn’t really do much with the provided components. Very few of them were available, and you couldn’t use them in a visual programming environment. So, new technologies were introduced, such as just-in-time (JIT) compilers to improve performance and, with Borland’s help, JavaBeans for a component-based development.
With these new technologies came more and more widget sets, for the AWT component set itself was very basic. So, applet download times grew and grew, because these new widget sets weren’t part of the core Java platform, and Java archive (JAR) files were introduced to improve delivery time. Eventually, each of the major browser vendors added its favorite component library to its virtual machine—AFC, IFC, and WFC, to name just a few. Yet all the libraries used different design models, and there were no true cross-browser standards.
Eventually, Sun Microsystems teamed up with Netscape Communication and other partners to create yet another library called the Java Foundation Classes, or JFC. Part of JFC is something called the Swing component set. This Swing component set is what this book is all about.
The Swing component set was originally created because the basic AWT components that came with the original version of the Java libraries were insufficient for real-world, forms-based applications. All the basic components were there, but the existing set was too small and far too restrictive. For instance, you couldn’t even put an image on a button. To alleviate this situation, the Swing component set offers replacements for each of the AWT components. The Swing components support all the capabilities of the original set and offer a whole lot more besides. As such, you should never need to deal with any of the basic AWT components.
原文的翻译
Java Swing技术概观
根据大英百科全书介绍，约在1930-1945年的美国，swing曾作为一种音乐而流行。是的，这也许和Java无关。在1995年5月23日，Sun公司自然科学办公室主任的约翰•盖奇向全世界介绍并引进了Java。随着Java的诞生出现了所谓的抽象工具包（AWT），反过来，抽象工具包的出现又带来了原生窗口部件集，并且早期的原生窗口部件集带来了一些麻烦。论文网
这些原生部件集随着Java平台的出现而出现，AWT过多地依赖于许多底层平台的特质。Java提供了最低的普遍版本而不是提供成熟的前瞻性组件集。如果一个功能并不适用于所有Java平台，那这个功能便并不是用在任何Java平台的。然后你不得不处理所有的浏览器/平台的差异。每个Java程序运行环境依赖于组件集是怎样与底层平台特定的原生组件集连接的。如果连接有问题，第一，他们是特定于平台（浏览器）的，第二，你必须围绕这些问题编写代码，这样才能够让你的程序一次编写，随时随地均可运行（WORA）。 Java Swing技术英文文献和中文翻译:http://www.youerw.com/fanyi/lunwen_29333.html