What it is

A JawGadget is a frameless floating picture on the desktop with selectable transparency

The picture can be dragged by holding the left mouse button

As a by-product, a JawGadget may be an icon in the taskbar (a tray icon)

Benefits

Mouse events from the native window will generate Java callbacks. Hot spot areas can trigger actions depending on the mouse position and button handling. For example, a complex picture representing a virtual device with specially designed buttons can be managed by a Java program, what is beyond the possibilities of the Java GUI (AWT, Swing).

Because every Java component, e.g. a JFrame, can be transformed to a picture and then displayed as JawGadget, the content of the JawGadget may change dynamically.

JawGadget works only for Windows operating systems (Window 2000 and higher). It is build with the JAW framwork (Java APIWrapper) and served essentially as a test bench for the development of JAW. When using JawGadget, no knowledge of the underlying JNI (Java Native Interface) or Windows API is needed. JawGadget is pure Java from the application programmers point of view. All functionality is hidden in a Java package and the accompanying Windows DLL. Using JawGadget is easy and requires only beginner's Java programming skills.