How to create a custom Swing Component

This article, How To Write a Custom Swing Component should be really helpful. It covers replicating a Windows slider control that has both discrete steps and a continuous range.

The JDK is open source. To understand how you write a Swing component, there is no better place to look than the source for Swing components. In general, when you create custom components, you are interested in one or more of the following: {interaction semantics, visual representation, compositional structure}

Start with the simplest cases:

Passive components: JLabel
Interactive components: JButton

JLabel will demonstrate the barebones extension of JComponent for custom drawing of a component; in this case, it is drawing the 'text' string value as its representation.

JButton will demonstrate the barebones extension for user interaction in addition to drawing the component.