Core JFC Java Foundation Classes 2nd edition - Read

This chapter looks at several Swing mechanisms that you can use to build
better applications. The main theme of the first half of the chapter is
the need to be able to operate the application without using a mouse.
This is often a difficult area for some software developers to get right because
they rarely use the keyboard to navigate around an application, but to the
expert user the ability to get quickly to the parts of the application that they use
the most is of great importance. Getting to a piece of the application quickly
usually means using accelerator keys or shifting the input focus manually with
the Tab key until a particular control is reached. This chapter looks at the basic
mechanisms that the Swing focus manager offers and shows how much simpler
it is to create key accelerators with Swing than it was with the AWT.
The use of keyboard accelerators leads naturally to the concept of
Actions, which encapsulate application functionality in a way that is independent
of the manner in which it is accessed. This chapter looks at using
Actions as targets for accelerator keys, but later you'll see that they can be
used with menus and toolbars as well.
The second half of the chapter looks at the powerful Swing scrolling components,
JScrollPane and JScrollBar. JScrollPane is much more useful
than its AWT counterpart (ScrollPane). You'll see how to arrange for a
component to be scrolled and how to customize the appearance and operation
of JScrollPane. Finally, the two halves of the chapter are brought
together by an example that shows how you can arrange for the user to be
able to scroll a view using only the keyboard.
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