The Java Tutorials have been written for JDK 8. Examples and practices described in this page don't take advantage of improvements introduced in later releases and might use technology no longer available.
See Dev.java for updated tutorials taking advantage of the latest releases.
See Java Language Changes for a summary of updated language features in Java SE 9 and subsequent releases.
See JDK Release Notes for information about new features, enhancements, and removed or deprecated options for all JDK releases.
This lesson gives you details about writing event listeners. You might not need to read this section. Your first source of information for event should be the how-to section for the component in question. Each component's section shows code for handling the events most commonly needed when implementing the component. For example, How to Use Check Boxes shows you how to handle mouse clicks on check boxes using an item listener.
The programs in this section illustrate events and event handling.
This section provides information that is useful for handling all types of events. One of the topics includes information on using adapters and inner classes to implement event handlers.
This is the place to find out which Swing components can fire which kinds of events. You might want to bookmark this section so you can easily find its quick-reference table.
This section has detailed information and examples of writing each common kind of event listener.
This section features a quick-reference table that shows each listener, its adapter class (if any), and its methods.
If you are having some hard-to-debug problems related to handling events, you might find the solution here.
Try these questions and exercises to test what you have learned in this lesson.
If you are interested in using JavaFX to create your GUI, see Handling JavaFX Events.