Making a button

Making a button

Making a button is quite simple: you just call the Button constructor with the label you want on the button. (You can also use the default constructor if you want a button with no label, but this is not very useful.) Usually you'll want to create a handle for the button so you can refer to it later.

The Button is a component, like its own little window, that will automatically get repainted as part of an update. This means that you don't explicitly paint a button or any other kind of control; you simply place them on the form and let them automatically take care of painting themselves. So to place a button on a form you override init( ) instead of overriding paint( ):

It's not enough to create the Button (or any other control). You must also call the Applet add( ) method to cause the button to be placed on the applet's form. This seems a lot simpler than it is, because the call to add( ) actually decides, implicitly, where to place the control on the form. Controlling the layout of a form is examined shortly.