How to create swing Tabbed Pane application using the Netbeans GUI editor

Question

I am fairly new to Java. I am trying to create a Java application that has a tabbed pane.

First, I created a Java application named app1 in Netbeans and then I added a TabbedPane to the already existing JFrame .

I noticed the code now has a app1 class extending javax.swing.JFrame . It also has a private javax.swing.JTabbedPane jTabbedPane2; at the bottom of the class.

Why aren't there any import statements for javax.swing.JTabbedPane and javax.swing.JFrame ? A tabbed frame can't be created without at least the javax.swing.JTabbedPane .

Also, I noticed the app1.form file contains the position and size of the items on the GUI Design area. This could lead to issues if I want to transfer code from one development environment to another. Is it best to incorporate the form data into the program at the final stage of development?

Thanks.

Answer 1

This code is not supposed to be read by a human, and imports are unnecessary because the classes are all fully qualified (package name + class name).

I don't know the exact reason for this design choice but I think it enables easier templating : since the code does not depend on any import, you can copy-paste it anywhere, it will work fine without having to care about bringing the necessary imports and merging them to the destination class's imports.