Java Widget Toolkit Swing

Swing is a widget toolkit for Java. It is part of Sun Micro system’s Java Foundation Classes (JFC) – an API for providing a graphical user interface (GUI) for Java programs. Swing includes GUI widgets such as text boxes, buttons, split-panes and tables.

Swing widgets provide more sophisticated GUI components than the earlier Abstract Window Toolkit. They are designed to be consistent across all platforms, unlike AWT widgets, map directly to the current platform’s graphics interface without modification. Swing supports a pluggable look and feel by using the current platform’s graphics interface to achieve consistency through modifications made by additional API calls. This means the application can use any supported look and feel on any platform. The disadvantage of lightweight components is slower execution. The advantage is uniform behavior on all platforms.

Java Swing is a highly partitioned architecture, which allows for the “plugging” of various custom implementations of specified framework interfaces: Users can provide their own custom implementation(s) of these components to override the default implementations. In general, Swing users can extend the framework by extending existing (framework) classes and/or providing alternative implementations of core components.