Chapter 22

 

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22. The java.awt.peer Package

The java.awt.peer package consists entirely of interface definitions. The hierarchy of these interfaces is shown in Figure 22.1. Each java.awt.peer interface corresponds to one of the java.awt Component or MenuComponent classes, and as you can see from the figure, the hierarchy of this package is identical to the hierarchy of those portions of the java.awt package.

The interfaces in this package define the methods that must be supported by the GUI components on a specific platform. Porting the java.awt GUI components to a new platform is a matter of implementing each of the methods in each of the interfaces in this package on top of the native GUI components of that platform. The Toolkit object in the java.awt package collects the implementations of these peer interfaces for a given platform. Toolkit contains methods that create instances of each of the interfaces in this package. Normal applications never need to instantiate these peers directly; instead they use the java.awt Component classes, which create peers as needed.

Because these peer interfaces are rarely used, and because the methods are quite similar to those of the corresponding java.awt component, there is no additional commentary for the individual interface definitions below.

public abstract interface ButtonPeer extends ComponentPeer {
    // Public Instance Methods
            public abstract void setLabel(String label);
}

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java.awt.image.ReplicateScaleFilter (JDK 1.1)		java.awt.peer.CanvasPeer (JDK 1.0)

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