The form and menu designers help you to create your initial form class from the design environment and even provide much of the skeleton code for things like event handlers. However, at some point you need to actually write code to make your application do what you want it to.
Event handler methods are called when an event is triggered from a user-interface element on the form, such as a mouse click on a control. The Designer creates skeleton code for these, so it's mostly a matter of filling in the code you want run when the event occurs. For other events, the WFC component model employs a new delegate keyword in the Visual J++ compiler that lets you map event handlers to custom events and provide event handlers for any controls that you write yourself.
In addition to controls and event handlers, there are many other parts of the WFC library that you will find useful.
Graphics support. Several classes in the wfc.ui package, including the Graphics class, provide support for accessing Windows graphical services.
Dynamic HTML support. The wfc.html package provides an extensive set of classes that provide access to the DHTML object model implemented by Internet Explorer (versions 4.0 and later). For an overview of the classes in the wfc.html, see Programming Dynamic HTML in Java. For reference information on this package, see Windows Foundation Classes for Java.
Data binding support. WFC is designed to use the ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) components to support both simple and complex data binding. Using the DataBinder component, you can bind a field from a recordset to the property of any WFC component. WFC also provides other complex-bound components that interact directly with a recordset. For more information, see Data Binding in WFC.
Localization support. WFC provides several classes in the wfc.ui package that make localizing your code much easier by letting you to store your resource elements, such as strings, in a resource file and accessing them by resource identifiers. This greatly simplifies the job of translating user interfaces for multiple languages.
Direct Win32 API support. The J/Direct technology provided with Visual J++ enables you to call any dynamic-link library (DLL) from your Java code. WFC is built upon a layer of J/Direct calls to Win32 libraries (implemented in the wfc.Win32 and wfc.OLE32 packages). Consequently, if you are comfortable with standard Windows programming and want to access those libraries directly, WFC provides the underlying elements (such as device contexts and window handles) to give you ultimate control. While this may be desirable for some specialized applications, most programmers will find the basic services of WFC sufficient. (For information on using J/Direct to access the Win32 API, see Writing Windows-Based Applications with J/Direct).
For more information on the WFC component model and many of the features of WFC, see the Visual J++ readme file (ReadMeVJ.htm).
