Chapter 14. Menus and Toolbars

This chapter discusses Swing menus and toolbars. Menus are the richer and more flexible of the two, so they encompass most of the chapter. They tend to be the first thing users explore in learning a new application, so it's fitting that Swing provides a great deal of freedom in laying out menu components.

Toolbars allow you to group buttons, combo boxes, and other elements together in repositionable panels; these tools can assist the user in performing many common tasks. You can add any component to a Swing toolbar, even non-Swing components. In addition, Swing allows the toolbar to be dragged from the frame and positioned inside a child window for convenience.