Swing Menus and Toolbars

Abstract

many of the low-level swing components were covered in the previous two chapters of this book. This chapter will delve into Swing’s menu-related components. Menus and toolbars help make your applications more user-friendly by providing visual command options. Users can avoid the somewhat archaic multi-key command sequences that are holdovers from programs such as the early word processor Word Star and the more current emacs programmer’s editor. Although Swing menus still support multi-key command sequences, the menus (and toolbars) are designed primarily for on-screen graphical selection with a mouse, instead of a keyboard.