Janice J. Heiss's Blog

Meet Josh Marinacci of the Swing Toolkit Team at Sun Microsystems

Please check out the front page of java.sun.com for a
"Meet the Engineer" Q&A, Meet Josh Marinacci of the Swing Toolkit Team at Sun Microsystems, I did with java.net blogger, Josh Marinacci.

Josh has made news recently with the publication of O'Reilly's Swing Hacks: Tips and Tools for Killer GUIs
which he co-authored with Chris Adamson. In the interview, he gives some of his favorite hacks
for Swing such as the Glass Pane component that sits on top application components and was used to
build many of the hacks in his book. He likens it to "a sheet of glass stretched across the top of your JFrames". It's his favorite tool for building cool hacks.

The core of this hack is the paintComponent() method of the component he installed as the glass pane with frame.setGlassPane(myMagComponent) which we've included in the article. (I wanted to include it here but I can't get the code to display correctly so next time folks, and my apologies.)

Check out the interview for more details and of course let me know what you think.

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