12.7 Windowed applications
It's possible to see that for safety's sake you can have only limited
behavior within an applet. In a real sense, the applet is a temporary extension
to the Web browser so its functionality must be limited along with its
knowledge and control. There are times, however, when you'd like to make
a windowed program do something else than sit on a Web page, and perhaps
you'd like it to do some of the things a "regular" application can
do and yet have the vaunted instant portability provided by Java. In previous
chapters in this book we've made command-line applications, but in some
operating environments (the Macintosh, for example) there isn't a command
line. So for any number of reasons you'd like to build a windowed, non-applet
program using Java. This is certainly a reasonable desire.
A Java windowed application can have menus and dialog boxes (impossible
or difficult with an applet), and yet if you're using an older version
of Java you sacrifice the native operating environment's look and feel.
The JFC/Swing library allows you to make an application that preserves
the look and feel of the underlying operating environment. If you want
to build
windowed applications, it makes sense to do so only if you can use
the latest version of Java and associated tools so you can deliver applications
that won't confound your users. If for some reason you're forced to use
an older version of Java, think hard before committing to building a significant
windowed application.