Pat Paternostro

Popup menus, the extremely functional components available to the Java developer, allow developers to provide menu capability without the inclusion of a full-blown menu system (i.e., MenuBar, Menus). From a user interface perspective, however, they're not intuitively accessible. The popup menu is usually triggered by pressing the right mouse button, but users may not be aware of its availability. This article details a PopupButton component that ties the popup menu to a button component and allows users to display the menu via a click of the PopupButton. Class Design The PopupButton component is made up of one abstract class, PopupButton, located in PopupButton.java (see Listing 1). This class extends the java.awt.Button class and implements the java.awt.event.ActionListener event listener interface. Since the class is abstract, the java.awt.event.ActionListener i... (more)

An AWT Tip Window Control

A tip window (also known as a tool tip window) is a small popup window that displays a single line of descriptive text. Tip windows are usually displayed over toolbar buttons to provide textual help about a toolbar button's functionality. The tip window control is available for Swing components via the JComponent class's setToolTipText() method; unfortunately, the AWT doesn't have an equivalent control at its disposal. This article details the classes that constitute my implementation of an AWT tip window control. Implementation The tip window control is made up of two classes, Ti... (more)

A Java File Search Utility

File searches are traditionally accomplished by an operating system utility. Most operating systems provide some sort of search facility that allows the user to track down misplaced or forgotten files. However, the facilities differ in their approach for searching files ­ graphical versus command-line interface, comprehensive versus limited search capability. If you work in multiple environments as I do, you become reliant on search functionality available in one environment that may not be supported in another. This article details a Java file search utility that provides a con... (more)

A Windows-Specific Java Utility Class

How do I disable a Frame's Minimize and Maximize buttons? How do I obtain the amount of a drive's free disk space? How do I retrieve the window handle of a Java Frame? How can I read the label of a disk drive? These and other similar questions are quite prevalent on the Java Usenet newsgroups. The answer to these questions is always the same: you need to use the Java Native Interface (JNI). These types of questions are so commonplace (not only in the newsgroups) that I decided to provide the answers in the form of a Windows-specific Java utility class written with the help of the... (more)