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| Chapter 22 |

# 22. The java.awt.peer Package

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The `java.awt.peer` package consists entirely of interface definitions. The hierarchy of these interfaces is shown in Figure 22.1. Each `java.awt.peer` interface corresponds to one of the `java.awt` `Component` or `MenuComponent` classes, and as you can see from the figure, the hierarchy of this package is identical to the hierarchy of those portions of the `java.awt` package.

The interfaces in this package define the methods that must be supported by the GUI components on a specific platform. Porting the `java.awt` GUI components to a new platform is a matter of implementing each of the methods in each of the interfaces in this package on top of the native GUI components of that platform. The `Toolkit` object in the `java.awt` package collects the implementations of these peer interfaces for a given platform. `Toolkit` contains methods that create instances of each of the interfaces in this package. Normal applications never need to instantiate these peers directly; instead they use the `java.awt` `Component` classes, which create peers as needed.

Because these peer interfaces are rarely used, and because the methods are quite similar to those of the corresponding `java.awt` component, there is no additional commentary for the individual interface definitions below.

#### Figure 22.1: The java.awt.peer package

## 22.1 java.awt.peer.ButtonPeer (JDK 1.0)

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    public abstract interface ButtonPeer extends ComponentPeer {
        // Public Instance Methods
                public abstract void setLabel(String label);
    }

### Returned By:

Toolkit.createButton()

java.awt.image.ReplicateScaleFilter (JDK 1.1) |  | java.awt.peer.CanvasPeer (JDK 1.0)