When/Why to use Canvas?

Question

Okay, so I'm looking into creating custom components and I know that Canvas class was made to give programmers a class to use solely for drawing. However, you could just use JComponent/Component to creat custom buttons, menu's, etc. So I'm a little confused why we have Canvas and what the best way is to go about making a custom component, graphically.

Answer 1

LavaJava wrote:
Okay, here's another point to bring up since you said don't mix awt and swing. Things like graphics and graphics 2d are under awt but to my knowledge there is no equivalent in swing. This all may seem confusing at first, but the more you play with it, the more you read on it, the more it will make sense. Morgalr and Darryl are as usual right on the money. As they state, Swing is built on top of AWT, however they are very different in how they display components. While AWT uses the native OS to render its buttons, panels and other widgets, Swing renders these things internally, all except the root container such as the JFrame (I believe). This gives Swing much greater flexibility in how it displays these things and how you can change and control them. Because of these differences though, it is generally not safe to display Swing widgets together with AWT widgets. There are as always exceptions, but you have to have a darn good reason to claim an exception (you don't), and have to have the smarts to be able to mingle the AWT and Swing widgets together (I don't).
Also, for some odd reason, JFrame is in swing package but it's hierarchy is under awt. In fact, that very fact about JFrame has give me problems when trying to do keybindings on a JFrame.Then don't do key bindings on the JFrame. Do it instead on one of the JComponents it holds. You do know that even the contentPane is at its heart a JComponent (though this needs to be casted if you want to use it directly).
Good luck,
Pete