Question

What is the actual difference between paint(), paintComponent() and paintComponents() in Java Swing?

I tried to understand what explained in Oracle docs but I am not clear.

Answer 1

• AWT, override paint().
• Swing top-level container (e.g.s are JFrame, JWindow, JDialog, JApplet ..), override paint(). But there are a number of good reasons not to paint in a TLC. A subject for a separate question, perhaps.
• The rest of Swing (any component that derives from JComponent), override paintComponent().
• Neither override nor explicitly call paintComponents(), leave it to the API to call it when needed.

Be sure to also use @Override notation whenever overriding a method.

Doing so would hint at the problem of trying to override paintComponent(..) in a JFrame (it has no such method), which is quite common to see.