The ideas in this article, originally written to address deficiencies in Java 1.0, have been largely obsoleted by newer releases of Java.

A "widget" is a reusable graphical user-interface (GUI) component that operates synergistically with callbacks - a mechanism by which user's action on a software application's GUI is connected to the code implementing the application's response to this action. The Implementing Callback article published last month showed how the callback mechanism can be implemented in Java and how standard AWT components can be extended to support it. Like callback, widget is a familiar concept to X Toolkit and Motif programmers. This follow-up article will introduce to the reader to the Widget interface class that helps in the implementation of the "widget" extension to AWT or other GUI components.

This article, published in Volume 3 Issue 6 of the Java Developer's Journal, describes how to implement a Widget interface class as well as how a more complex widget can be easily built out of simpler components using the widget and callback mechanisms.

Source code associated with this article has been obsoleted and is no longer supported.