5. Graphical User Interfaces

A graphical user interface (GUI) is that part of a Java program that interacts with the user of the program via mouse actions, keyboard actions, buttons, scrollbars, menus, windows, and other point-and-click user interface elements drawn on the screen. Java provides a package of classes called the Abstact Window Toolkit (AWT) to construct graphical user interfaces. In this chapter we shall learn how to use the java.awt package. We shall not discuss every possible GUI component or every possible interaction between user and program, but instead we show the AWT basics to get started.