Question

My problem is that when trying to set the background color in a JApplet i’m trying to create, i am unable to get any color other than the default gray.

I would really appreciate it if someone was able to not only tell me whats wrong but also explain it. This technique was learned through a textbook and so, i want to understand the problem so that i know what is going on.

Any and all help is appreciated.

Thank you in advance,

SDG

public class QuoteApplet extends JApplet
{

    public void paint (Graphics appPage)
    {
        setBackground(Color.YELLOW);

        appPage.drawRect(65,55,255,100);
        //page.drawRect(60,80,225,30);
        //page.drawOval(75,65, 20, 20);
        appPage.drawLine(30,30,30,100);
        appPage.drawLine(40,30,40,100);
        appPage.drawLine(55,45,15,85);

        appPage.drawString("There once lived a man named Oedipus Rex.", 70, 70);
        appPage.drawString("You may have heard about his odd complex.", 70, 90);
        appPage.drawString("His name appears in Freud's index,", 70, 110);
        appPage.drawString("'cause he loved his mother.", 70, 130);
        appPage.drawString("-Tom Lehrer", 200, 150);
    }
}

Answer 1

You want to set the background color of the applet’s contentPane, not the applet itself. So call getContentPane().setBackground(...). And you don’t want to do this from within the paint method. Instead do it in init(). In fact, it is rare that you’ll ever want to override a JApplet’s paint method, and certainly not here. You’re much better drawing in the paintComponent(...) method of a JPanel or other class that derives from JComponent and then adding that to the contentPane, or using it as the contentPane.