I'm trying to learn a little about Swing before I make my first attempt at programming a GUI. I had a couple of questions: When is a graphics object passed to a Swing Component for painting? Does this only happen with custom components, or all components? What does the graphics object help the compnent do? How is it involved in the painting process?
A Graphics object is passed to the paintComponent() method of any component that needs to be painted. AFAIK, this happens with all components. The Graphics class provides functions that allow you to paint on a window or other component. These methods include drawLine(), drawRect(), and many others. For more details, you should look at the API documentation for the Graphics class. It lists all the methods that are available for your use. In fact, you should bookmark the index for the API docs for the version of the Java SDK that you are using and learn how to navigate it. These documents provide most of the information you need about any class in the API. HTH Layne