New to GUI's. Where to start?

843807

I'm fairly new to Java and programming as a whole, but I'm ambitious and I have an idea for a program I'd like to create for myself as a sort of project. Up to now, all of my programs have ran in a command window, and I'm finding the idea of completely custom GUI creation a bit overwhelming. To be as concise as possible, I'm looking to make a GUI very similar to the Google calendar in functionality; i.e. being able to click on a particular day to enter some information to be worked with. I've dug around in this forum a bit, and did some research on the capabilities of both Swing and AWT, but I'm simply not sure where to find what I need to learn, or even what I should focus on specifically. I'm not looking for someone to give me the answers, just something like "Oh, a GUI like that would use [this] and [that]. Try searching for tutorials for [whatever]."

I hope I'm being clear enough and not overly wordy. Thanks to any and all help. If I should clear something up, let me know.

darrylburke

Start with the Swing tutorials linked from the topic listing page for the Swing forum.

db

User_64CKJ

I note you posted this question to a forum about AWT. The AWT packages contains many important classes to do with layouts, colors, fonts, D'n'D, printing etc., but I would advise avoiding the AWT component (Button, TextArea, Frame etc.) toolkit completely. In this day and age, the Swing components are used almost exclusively by developers, they have more and better enabled components, and you will be able to get more help on questions.

Perhaps if some kindly moderator notices the thread, they might move it to the Swing forum.

843807

I was afraid of that. I really only posted it here, because I thought Swing was mostly used for buttons, menus and such. My mistake.