Java on a touchscreen

I've been asked to develop an application for a tablet, i.e. using a touchscreen. The application itself isn't a problem, but since I have no experience at all with touchscreens (and no real way to get the experience, since I lack a touchscreen device myself), I did the next best thing: Google it. However, I found two different answers: One claimed I need to make use of the Canvas class to capture what the user does on their touchscreen, and one suggested it should be identical to using a mouse.

Thus, my question: Does anyone have experience themselves using touchscreens? If so, how does it work? Should I start reading into different interfaces, or will the normal ones (i.e. ActionListener, MouseListener, etc) work?

Depends on the tablet I presume.
I mean, if it's Android then you won't be using Swing anyway, and it has the whole UI framework based around touchscreens.

Right, should've added that in the OP... It's a Windows tablet.

I thought that might be the case, just wanted to be sure...:)
Single touch used to be treated as a mouse, where touching the screen is a mouse-down at that location, and then track the movement of the finger (which may result in a click event or not).
How you would handle multi-touch, though, I have no idea.

I'm not too concerned with multi-touch (it'll be a rather simple application), so for now I'll just work under the assumption that it'll be identical to an application used with a mouse. Means I can develop it on my own computer instead of having to rely on a touchscreen device for running the application. Thanks for your help!

For single touch screens you can't (easily) simulate 'right mouse clicks'. If you properly distinguish between 'finger down', 'finger up' and 'finger moved' events you can synthesize the events 'mouse pressed', 'mouse released', 'mouse entered' and 'mouse released' events. Components themselves should (optinally) synthesize them to a 'mouse clicked' event.

kind regards,

Jos

Hmm. Good point on the rightclick... I hadn't actually thought about that one. Fortunately it shouldn't be hard to make this specific application without it though. Thanks!