Features Roadmap

Advanced GUI Building

The Java 2D, audio, and JavaBeans APIs provide advanced functionality for building interesting, modular, and more usuable user interfaces.

Java 2D

Java 2D gives you everything you need to enhance the appearance of your GUI with shapes, color, stylized text, foreign-language text, and image processing. It also introduces a printing model fo the Windows and Solaris platforms that gives you more control, power, and flexibility in application-level printing.

The java.awt and java.awt.image packages are enhanced, and the java.awt.color, java.awt.font, java.awt.geom, and java.awt.print packages are new.

• java.awt includes the new Graphics2D class for better geometry, transformation, color, and text rendering, and has enhanced color and font capabilities. The Color class supports a full range of color spaces, and the Font class supports any font on the system. You also get more texture map and fill pattern options, image compositing and transparency capabilities, more line widths, end caps, line styles, and dash patterns, and a flexible device model.

• java.awt.color supports high-quality color output using profiles and a full array of color spaces for defining device-dependent and device-independent color attributes.

• java.awt.font supports glyphs and text with multiple fonts that can be transformed and drawn into a graphics context.

• java.awt.geom lets you create a wide range of shapes including arbitrary and point-by-point paths, perform affine transformations (transformations that maintain parallel lines), and allows float and/or double precision in most cases.

• java.awt.image supports a full-range of image processing capabilities including affine transformation, amplitude scaling, lookup-table modification, color conversions, and convolutions. The BufferedImage class describes an image with an accessible buffer of image data consisting of color model and data layout information.

• java.awt.print introduces a printing model for the Windows and Solaris platforms where the printing system drives the printing process to give you more control, power, and flexibility in application-level printing. The Java 2D printing system can print all Java 2D regular and composited graphics, and supports soft collating, reverse order printing, and booklet printing.

Audio

The Applet class provides the getAudioClip and newAudioClip methods so you can create and use AudioClips from applications.

JavaBeans

The JavaBeans APIs let you build reusable and interchangeable software components that can be visually constructed and manipulated in builder tools. JavaBeans can be simple like pushbuttons or dialog boxes, or more complex like spreadsheets and calendars. While individual JavaBeans vary in functionality, most have the following features in common:

• Introspection, which allows a builder tool to analyze how a bean works.

• Customization, which allows a user to alter the appearance and behavior of a bean.

• Events, which allow Beans to fire events and inform builder tools about events.

• Properties, which allow beans to be manipulated programatically and support customization.

• Persistence, which allows customized beans in an application builder to have their state saved and restored. Typically persistence is used with an application builder's save and load menu commands to restore any work that has gone into constructing an application.

In JDK 1.2, the JavaBeans APIs include an extensible and standard runtime containment and services protocol, and drag and drop support.

Runtime Containment and Services Protocol means that when a Bean is introduced to its environment, it knows it is running inside the Java VM and has access to the core Java APIs. This provides a standard way to nest Beans within other Beans and have the nested Bean be able to access additional runtime services from its environment. It also lets the environment or containing Bean extend its capabilities directly to the nested bean.

Drag-and-Drop Support means that Java and non-Java applications can readily share data. JavaBeans drag-and-drop works with the JFC Accessibility APIs and can be extended to support diverse input devices.

Features Roadmap