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Object-Oriented environments are known for the use of “objects” and their interaction with each other as well as the idea of polymorphism and inheritance. The Swing component JTable embodies all these ideas to create a very powerful graphic interface. Starting at the highest level, JTable is a subclass of the Object Class all the way down to being a subclass of JComponent. Through the use of the methods predefined in its class heritage, as well as the many methods defined for itself, JTable is a very versatile class, showing off the capabilities of the Object-Oriented paradigm.
Before diving into JTables, one must take a step back and examine Swing. Swing is a powerful package created to enhance graphical user interfaces. Swing comes with a package of classes such as JButton, JCheckBox, and JFrame. Alone, these classes are useless. Together, these classes can provide a powerful user friendly interface, capable of countless tasks. JTable is a great implementation of this. A running JTable looks very similar to Microsoft Excel. It displays a two dimensional table which allows a user to view, edit, and store the contents of the table. Any feature of Swing is able to be displayed in a cell of a JTable. A single JTable can be comprised of many rows with columns that display an integer, string, JButton, JCheckBox, or even a JTable itself.
The power of JTables are based on Object-Oriented design mechanisms. As stated before, Object Oriented languages are known for their “objects” interacting with one another. JTables are a great example of this. Running a JTable graphically shows this concept. The JTable itself is an object which has other objects in it, working with each other, to make a more powerful implementation than itself. To extend to use of Object-Oriented mechanisms, these objects are all related to each other in the class hierarchy. JTable is a subclass of JComponent as is JButton. JTable and JButton have access to methods...