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Magic with Merlin: Swing's new Spinner component
Welcome to Magic with Merlin, a bi-weekly series designed to give you a leg up on programming with Java 2 Standard Edition, version 1.4. Over the coming months, author John Zukowski will offer tips and tricks for navigating the wealth of new features in this release. In this installment, John describes the new JSpinner component of Swing, which allows you to choose dates, numbers, and selections from pick lists.
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01 Jul 2001 |
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Magic with Merlin: Exceptions and logging
The Merlin release adds several exception-handling-related features for understanding the root cause of a problem and responding appropriately. In this installment of Magic with Merlin, John Zukowski demonstrates how these new logging and exception features work and provides an example program for review and download.
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01 Dec 2001 |
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Magic with Merlin: AWT roundup
Merlin makes several additions to the AWT library, including the ability to find the space used for screen adornments like the desktop toolbar, capitalizing Color constants, mouse wheel support, and the ability to differentiate between mouse and keyboard keys and locations better. Follow along with John Zukowski as he describes these changes and provides the nitty-gritty details to get you started fast.
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01 Nov 2001 |
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Magic with Merlin: The generics prototype
J2SE 1.5 (a.k.a. Tiger) hasn't yet made its official debut, but you can take the early access release of the generics prototype download out for a spin now. Try out parameterized types, enumerations, variable argument lists, autoboxing, enhanced for loops, and static imports -- all language-level enhancements expected in the 1.5 release of J2SE. Share your thoughts on this article with the author and other readers in the accompanying discussion forum.
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19 Dec 2003 |
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Magic with Merlin: Dynamic event listener proxies
Java 1.4 introduces the EventHandler class, which relies on the dynamic generation of listeners to ease the task at hand. Though the new features are typically meant for the IDE vendor to use, in this article columnist John Zukowski shows you how you can use them for hand coding, too.
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21 Oct 2003 |
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Magic with Merlin: Indeterminate progress bars
Developers use a JProgressBar component to show users how far along a task has progressed. For really long tasks or those where it's difficult to figure out exactly how far along that task is, the Merlin release adds an indeterminate mode to JProgressBar. This month, columnist John Zukowski provides a refresher on using JProgressBar and discusses its new indeterminate mode.
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18 Nov 2003 |
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Magic with Merlin: SpringLayout manager
The newly introduced SpringLayout manager offers an alternative when designing complex screens, allowing components to be positioned relative to one another. In this article, Merlin veteran John Zukowski shows you how to use this new layout manager.
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17 Sep 2003 |
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Magic with Merlin: Formatting numbers and currency
With the Merlin release of the J2SE platform, internationalizing your applications when formatting integers has gotten simpler, and you can now find out the ISO 4217 currency codes. In this month's Magic with Merlin column, John Zukowski shows you how to format numbers and introduces the new support for discovering local currency codes.
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13 Aug 2003 |
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Magic with Merlin: The ins and outs of Merlin's new I/O buffers
In this Magic with Merlin article, resident Java programming wizard John Zukowski shows how to manipulate the data buffers underlying the J2SE new I/O packages, for such tasks as reading/writing primitives and working with memory-mapped files.
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25 Mar 2003 |
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Magic with Merlin: Java networking enhancements
John Zukowski shows you what's new and different in Java technology networking, including the latest networking features in J2SE 1.4, IPv6 support, URIs, network interfaces, secure sockets, and unbound sockets.
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25 Feb 2002 |
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Magic with Merlin: Swing's new JFormattedTextField component
Accepting formatted input doesn't have to be difficult with input verifiers and focus listeners, as this article shows.
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01 Jun 2002 |
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Magic with Merlin: Printing in JDK 1.4, Part 2
In this second installment of his two-part introduction to the new Java Print Service API, John Zukowski shows how to set up event listeners for your print operations, print the contents of a screen or component, and remove the sleep() call from your printing operations.
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01 Apr 2002 |
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Magic with Merlin: Printing in JDK 1.4, Part 1
It seems like every new release of the Java platform since 1.1 has brought changes to the platform's printing support framework. Merlin is no exception. In this month's Magic with Merlin, John Zukowski begins a two-part discussion of the latest capabilities.
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01 Mar 2002 |
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Magic with Merlin: Working with preferences
The addition of the java.util.prefs package to Java 1.4 (through JSR 10) lets you manipulate user preference data and configuration data by providing you with access to an implementation-specific registry (for example, the Windows Registry on Windows platforms). In this installment of Magic with Merlin, John Zukowski introduces you to the Preferences class and walks you through its use. He puts it all together with a sample program.
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01 Oct 2001 |
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Magic with Merlin: Porter-Duff rules!
Two-dimensional graphics programming with the Java language just got a little better. The AlphaComposite class, which previously supported only eight of the 12 Porter-Duff rules for digital image compositing, now supports all 12. In this installment of Magic with Merlin, John Zukowski describes all 12 rules and offers an interactive program to demonstrate how they operate.
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01 Sep 2001 |
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Magic with Merlin: Maintaining insertion order
Follow along with John Zukowski as he demonstrates how to iterate through the elements of a hashed collection in insertion order and how to maintain elements in access order with the new Collections Framework implementations in J2SE, version 1.4.
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01 Aug 2001 |
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Magic with Merlin: Scrolling tabbed panes
Prior to the Merlin release of the Java platform, Swing's JTabbedPane control only allowed you to wrap tabs across multiple rows. The new and improved version of JTabbedPane lets you scroll the tabs across a single row. In this installment of Magic with Merlin, John Zukowski demonstrates how to change the layout policy of JTabbedPane and provides a complete example for you to use.
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01 Sep 2001 |
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Magic with Merlin: Long-term persistence
The ability to save the JavaBean component state for long-term persistence within an XML document has been a topic of much discussion with Java developers in the past few years. This feature has finally been adopted in the 1.4 version of J2SE. In this installment of Magic with Merlin, John Zukowski shows you how to use the new XMLEncoder and XMLDecoder classes, bypassing serialization and allowing you to generate fully initialized bean instances.
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01 Jul 2001 |
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Magic with Merlin: Just another plain Frame
Java 1.4 now allows you to remove a frame's title bar and programmatically maximize the frame. John Zukowski details and demonstrates these changes with this quick start and also shows how to support moving a frame without a draggable area.
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01 Jul 2001 |
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Magic with Merlin: Working with assertions
Merlin adds the ability to provide optional pre- and post-condition validation to methods for improved testing. Although the assertions facility is disabled by default at run time, it can be enabled to check error conditions. In this edition of Magic with Merlin, John Zukowski walks you through the basics of adding assertion checking to your code as well as enabling and disabling assertions, both from the command line and programmatically.
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01 Feb 2002 |
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Magic with Merlin: Focus, focus, focus
Focus is the art of managing what component receives keyboard input and when it receives it. In past versions of J2SE, this feature didn't always work according to plan. In this article, columnist John Zukowski explores one of Merlin's many changes to remedy earlier focus problems.
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15 Jul 2003 |
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Magic with Merlin: J2SE 1.4.2 gets two new look-and-feel designs
John Zukowski uses the latest 1.4.2 release (in beta at the time of this writing) to show Windows users how to get the newer look of Windows XP, as well as the GTK+ look typical of a Linux desktop.
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27 May 2003 |
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Magic with Merlin: Exercise complete control over your graphics display
Game developers and computer speed nuts alike will love Merlin's new Fullscreen Exclusive Mode (FEM) API, with which you can write directly to video memory with complete control over the graphics display. Java programming expert John Zukowski introduces the power of this new Merlin feature.
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29 Apr 2003 |
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Magic with Merlin: Character sets
Three classes in the java.nio.charset package help convert between character sets when moving legacy applications to the Java platform. John Zukowski walks you through these classes and provides an example that demonstrates the features.
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01 Oct 2002 |
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Magic with Merlin: Parse sequences of characters with the regex library
John Zukowski shows you how to parse sequences of characters with the new regular expression library to add power to your search patterns.
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01 Aug 2002 |
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Magic with Merlin: Swinging audio
The Swing architecture has traditionally provided a means for developers to create user interfaces for Java applications that mimic native UIs. The latest version of the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition takes this idea a step further with a mechanism for associating feedback sounds with UI actions -- the kinds of beeps and clinks that users are accustomed to hearing out of their computer speakers. Though this functionality is turned off by default, John Zukowski shows you how to unlock its power in this article.
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01 Jul 2002 |
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