Members of the Java Client team that was responsible for Swing included James Gosling (Architect), Rick Levenson (manager), Amy Fowler & Hans Muller (co-technical leads), Tom Ball, Jeff Dinkins, Georges Saab, Tim Prinzing, Jonni Kanerva, and Jeannette Hung & Jim Graham (2D Graphics). In 2018, JavaFX was made a part of the OpenJDK under the OpenJFX project to increase the pace of its development. JavaFX is replacing Swing owing to several advantages, including being more lightweight, having CSS styling, sleek design controls, and the use of FXML and Scene Builder. JavaFX was open-sourced in 2011 and, in 2012, it became part of the Oracle JDK download. The Swing classes and components are contained in the javax.swing package hierarchy.ĭevelopment of Swing's successor, JavaFX, started in 2005, and it was officially introduced two years later at JavaOne 2007. Originally distributed as a separately downloadable library, Swing has been included as part of the Java Standard Edition since release 1.2. 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. 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 'Java Foundation Classes' were later renamed 'Swing.' On April 2, 1997, Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications Corporation announced their intention to incorporate IFC with other technologies to form the Java Foundation Classes. The Internet Foundation Classes (IFC) were a graphics library for Java originally developed by Netscape Communications Corporation and first released on December 16, 1996. In December 2008, Sun Microsystems (Oracle's predecessor) released the CSS / FXML based framework that it intended to be the successor to Swing, called JavaFX.

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

It has more powerful and flexible components than 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. Swing was developed to provide a more sophisticated set of GUI components than the earlier Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT). It is part of Oracle's Java Foundation Classes (JFC) – an API for providing a graphical user interface (GUI) for Java programs.

Java gui programming examples