Stupid Java Tricks

There are many ways to create your own window type in Java. The level of complexity often depends on the level of customization that you want. I’m going to walk you through the creation of a simple, custom, “frameless”, window that extends JDialog. I started off using JWindow, but noticed that it was not passing focus to my JTextField components. I probably could have implemented a focus traversal policy, but since the JDialog’s focus behavior was what I needed anyway, I just extended it instead.
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The more I use the Eclipse IDE, the more I’m surprised at what it can do. The other day, for instance, I was thinking that I’d like to find a GUI tool that would generate Javadocs for my project. Before Googling though, I checked my Eclipse documentation and found that the feature was already there. All I had to do was tell Eclipse where to find javadoc.exe. For anyone interested, here is the procedure using Eclipse 3.1 in a Windows environment.
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