Difference between paint() and paintcomponent()?

Question

I have tried tutorials on this but I still don't quite understand it. Basically my question is which method is better and why? Should I use paint or paintComponent?

Please try to keep the answer simple, thanks.

Solution 1

Quoting from documentation of paint() method

This method actually delegates the work of painting to three protected methods: paintComponent, paintBorder, and paintChildren. ... A subclass that just wants to specialize the UI (look and feel) delegate's paint method should just override paintComponent.

It looks like the paint() method actually draws the component, including the border and children. If you only want to customize the component's appearance excluding the border and children, you use paintComponent().

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/javax/swing/JComponent.html#paint(java.awt.Graphics)

Solution 2

Generally speaking, when painting in Swing, it is recommended to override paintComponent.

There are a number of reasons why, one is paintComponent is painted at the bottom layer, meaning you won't accidentally wiping out any components that were rendered during the paint process - this happens a lot to people who post here.

There are a, very, few times you might need to override paint, but I would always encourage you to try making it work with paintComponent first.

Check out

• Performing custom painting
• Painting in AWT and Swing (+1 to trashgod)

Comments

[trashgod]

See also Painting in AWT and Swing.

[MadProgrammer]

While correct, it would be prudent to link to a more to update version of the JavaDocs, just to highlight to developers potential changes to the API

[christianhs]

I edited the link. thanks @MadProgrammer for reminding me about this

[MadProgrammer]

Still got a +1 for the answer regardless ;)

[camickr]

I don't think it matters if you override paint() or paintComponent() from a double buffering point of view. See the double buffering section from the "Painting in AWT and Swing" article. Now if you happen to override paint() at a frame level (which I never recommend) and forget about invoking super.paint() then you can get into some trouble.

[MadProgrammer]

@camickr Ah yes, you're right, that's the argument for not overriding top level containers :P