org.netbeans.swing.tabcontrol (Tab Control)

Interface Summary
Interface	Description
ComponentConverter	A class which can provide a component corresponding to a TabData object.
LocationInformer	Deprecated
SlideBarDataModel
TabDataModel	A data model representing a set of tabs and their associated data.
WinsysInfoForTabbed	Interface that provides external information (provided by window system) that TabbedContainers need to know in order to work fully.

Class Summary
Class	Description
ComponentConverter.Fixed	A ComponentConverter implementation which always returns the same component
DefaultTabDataModel	Default implementation of TabDataModel.
SlideBarDataModel.Impl
SlidingButton	JToggleButton subclass which maps to an index in the data model, and displays whatever the content of the data model at that index is.
SlidingButtonUI	Button UI for SlidingButton component that can paint rotated text.
TabbedContainer	A tabbed container similar to a JTabbedPane.
TabbedContainerUI	Basic UI for tabbed containers.
TabData	Class representing data needed to represent a component in a tab.
TabDisplayer	A Component which displays tabs supplied by a TabDataModel.
TabDisplayerUI	The basic UI of a tab displayer component.
TabListPopupAction	An action which, when invoked, displays a popup with an alphabetized table of all the tabs in a TabDisplayer.
WinsysInfoForTabbedContainer	Interface that provides external information (provided by window system) that TabbedContainers need to know in order to work fully.

Package org.netbeans.swing.tabcontrol Description

TabDisplayer and TabbedControl

This package contains two gui components:

TabDisplayer - A component which displays tabs, the contents of which are defined in a TabDataModel. This can be used as a standalone component for tab-driven navigation. It has several UI styles available to suit different purposes, such as scrollable tabs, fixed width tabs, or toggle buton tabs.
TabbedContainer - A component which also takes a TabDataModel, which offers similar functionality to a JTabbedPane, and (as an implementation detail) embeds a TabDisplayer to display its tabs.

Where these classes differ from JTabbedPane is as follows:

Fully model driven - the contents of the AWT hierarchy are an artifact, not the primary source of information about the contents of the tabbed container. Several policies are available for when components to be displayed in tabs are to be physically added to a container
Multiple UI styles supported up front - Several different UI styles are supported, with UI delegates for the major look and feels.
Drag and drop visualization support - while the actual functionality of what to drag and what to do with it is left up to the application, there is built in support for creating drag images of tabs and visual feedback for where a tab will be placed if dropped.
Support for using a single component across multiple tabs is designed in - there are some hacks one can do which (maybe) will allow a JTabbedPane to do this, but they are not recommended. This is made easy using the ComponentConverter class, which determines how an element in the data model is translated into a GUI component
Very granular event model - TabDataModel is designed on the assumption that the application may atomically add/remove/modify discontiguous ranges of tabs, their contents, titles or icons, and that such operations should be handled atomically, generating a single event/repaint

Besides this module the org.netbeans.swing.popupswitcher package is used from core/windows too. Classes contained in the package are rather general and therefore this package could be moved in the future. It is placed here only due to current modules dependencies. Consequently the package is not intended for external use.