Develop Reference

Full table background color in swing

I'm building my Java application interface using a lot of Photoshop.
But after implementing a table it doesn't look pretty cool as you can see:
I would like to make the table as transparent as possible, so only letters are shown. I have setted all the colors to black.
Any solution?

JTable#setFillsViewportHeight would be the starting point.
Make sure that the background color of the JTable has been set accordingly

Canvas vs Image Android

I have a background image that is white and semi-transparent. This is used as a text container so you can differentiate between the background image and text.
Currently I am using an image that is a white rectangle with rounded corners, but of course when using this on different screen sizes the image is distorted, not massively or that noticeably, but would it be better or possible to draw this image with a canvas?
If it is possible would it slow down the app considerably?
UPDATE:
Thank you #jkhouw1 I have looked into 9 patch images and this seems very suitable. I am still interested in knowing the benefit of canvas against images, but if you post something as an answer I will accept it. Thank you.

use a nine patch is a graphic that android can scale appropriately. see here: http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/draw9patch.html
and here http://www.higherpass.com/Android/Tutorials/Android-9-Patch-Scaled-Png-Image-Guide/

Haven't tried this yet, but I think this should be possible by defining a shape drawable. You can define round corners and you can make it semi-transparent by defining the color with alpha-value, for example #80FF0000 should be semi-transparent red.
I assume this would be a good solution both in terms of compatibility and performance.

Zoom in Java Swing application

I am looking for ways to zoom in a Java Swing application. That means that I would like to resize all components in a given JPanel by a given factor as if I would take an screenshot of the UI and just applied an "Image scale" operation. The font size as well as the size of checkboxes, textboxes, cursors etc. has to be adjusted.
It is possible to scale a component by applying transforms to a graphics object:
protected Graphics getComponentGraphics(Graphics g) {
Graphics2D g2d=(Graphics2D)g;
g2d.scale(2, 2);
return super.getComponentGraphics(g2d);
}
That works as long as you don't care about self-updating components. If you have a textbox in your application this approach ceases to work since the textbox updates itself every second to show the (blinking) cursor. And since it doesn't use the modified graphics object this time the component appears at the old location. Is there a possibility to change a components graphics object permanently? There is also a problem with the mouse click event handlers.
The other possibility would be to resize all child components of the JPanel (setPreferredSize) to a new size. That doesn't work for checkboxes since the displayed picture of the checkbox doesn't change its size.
I also thought of programming my own layout manager but I don't think that this will work since layout managers only change the position (and size) of objects but are not able to zoom into checkboxes (see previous paragraph). Or am I wrong with this hypothesis?
Do you have any ideas how one could achieve a zoomable Swing GUI without programming custom components? I looked for rotatable user interfaces because the problem seems familiar but I also didn't find any satisfying solution to this problem.
Thanks for your help,
Chris

You could give a try to the JXLayer library.
There are several tools in it, which could help you to make a zoom. Check the examples shown here. I would recommend you to read more about the TransformUI, from this library. From the example, it seems like it could help solving your problem.

Scaling the view is easy enough; transforming mouse coordinates is only slightly more difficult. Here's an elementary example. I'd keep JComponents out, although it might make sense to develop an analogous ScaledComponent that knows about the geometry. That's where #Gnoupi's suggestion of using a library comes in.

hey you can try this if you want to zoom a image like any other image viewer the use a JPanel draw an image using drawImage() method now create a button and when you click the button increase the size of the panel on the frame it appears as if the image is being viewed in Zoom

You might find Piccolo2D.java API useful: http://code.google.com/p/piccolo2d/
It is very simple.
It touts in particular its smooth zooming. You essentially make a "canvas" that can contain various elements, and can then zoom by just holding right-click and panning the mouse back and forth.
I worked on a team that used it to create this: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/guitar/index.php?title=WebGuitar#EFG.2FGUI_Visualizer
The nodes you see there are clickable links themselves.

Since Java 9, there are VM arguments (actually meant to be used for high dpi scaling) that can render a application with a higher scaling factor:
java -Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2.0 -jar MyApplication.jar
Or:
java -Dsun.java2d.win.uiScaleX=2.0 -Dsun.java2d.win.uiScaleY=2.0 -jar MyApplication.jar

mouseListeners and JLabels using images with transparent pixels

I'm willing to make a isometric game but I'm having hard time with the mouseListener.
I'm using Swing and make losanges by using square images with transparent pixels (GIF format).
The problem is that making losanges touch each other edge means having the transparent pixels of one on the top of the others, which is a problem with the mouseListener.
I'm willing to know exactly which losange was clicked on, but as the transparent pixels of the nearby losange get on the top of the one that was clicked on, the wrong losange is selected as the KeyEvent source.
Is there a way to have mouseListener not considering transparent pixels as part of the shape ?
Thanks for reading.

It's not clear
1) why the tiles have to overlap, or
2) why you're using JLabels for the tiles
There's are many ways to solve the problem you're having, but I'd just make a single JComponent that renders the tiles as needed, and is the sole MouseListener.

As mentioned by Jonathan, I think you're using the wrong technology for the job. I've had great success using a 2D graphics framework for software such as this. In my case I'm a big fan of Piccolo. I know you don't want to hear this, but consider starting over with the appropriate toolset.

Floating Rectangle on Screen

I know how to draw a rectangle onto a JPanel, but how can I paint a rectangle to the screen so that the rectangle appears to be floating? More specifically, a non-filled rectangle. My thought is to use a transparent JFrame with a rectangle drawn on it; however, this makes all of the content in the JFrame transparent.
My Solution
So I think there are many ways of going about this, some more complex than others, some more practical than others.
I tried the splash screen. The problem with that is you need to pass VM parameters "-splash " when you run. I created a manifest file to automate this/put the parameters into eclipse; but then the code is dependent on the .gif file and I can't change the size/position of the rectangle easily. Similar problems occur while faking it via screen screenshot. Good suggestions though, I learned some pretty cool stuff.
So, back to what I did. I used a JFrame, got the content pane and set the background to red (what ever color you want), then set the frame undecorated which removes the titlebar and border of the window. This created a floating rectangle which I could easily change the size and location of (frame.setSize, .setLocation). I have yet to make this a non filled rectangle, I tried internal frames and layeredpanes, but no success.

JFrame is a heavyweight component, and those were always opaque for the longest time. However, since Java 6u10, there is an inofficial API for transparent windows in the class com.sun.awt.AWTUtilities, which will most likely become official in Java 7. In earlier versions, the only way to simulate this kind of thing was to fake it via screenshots taken with java.awt.Robot

You would probably have to have parts of the window transparent while the actual drawn rectangle is not. I doubt there is a platform-agnostic solution for this so you would need to resort to JNI for this. Depending on what you need to do it might also be nice to make the window invisible for clicks which would need other tricks as well.

https://github.com/twall/jna/
That project offers a library and has examples of a clock and info balloons that are semi-transparent and transcend even what you're trying to do. The demos work well on Windows but I couldn't speak to how cross platform they are.

You might want to look at JLayeredPane. The demo on this page shows partially what you want, however when painting your rectangle you'll need to set your paint to transparent:
AlphaComposite ac = AlphaComposite.getInstance(AlphaComposite.SRC_OVER, 0.5f);
g2d.setComposite(ac);
g2d.drawImage(image, x, y, this);