Java Swing Bootcamp | Build Java GUI Applications With Swing

Swing is a GUI widget toolkit for Java. It is part of Oracle’s Java Foundation Classes (JFC) – an API for providing a graphical user interface (GUI) for Java programs.

Swing was developed to provide a more sophisticated set of GUI components than the earlier Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT). Swing provides a look and feel that emulates the look and feel of several platforms, and also supports a pluggable look and feel that allows applications to have a look and feel unrelated to the underlying platform. It has more powerful and flexible components than AWT. In addition to familiar components such as buttons, check boxes and labels, Swing provides several advanced components such as tabbed panel, scroll panes, trees, tables, and lists.

Unlike AWT components, Swing components are not implemented by platform–specific code. Instead, they are written entirely in Java and therefore are platform–independent.

Swing introduced a mechanism that allowed the look and feel of every component in an application to be altered without making substantial changes to the application code. The introduction of support for a pluggable look and feel allows Swing components to emulate the appearance of native components while still retaining the benefits of platform independence. Originally distributed as a separately downloadable library, Swing has been included as part of the Java Standard Edition since release 1.2. The Swing classes and components are contained in the javax.swing package hierarchy.