Swing application

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.

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. Development of Swing's successor, JavaFX, started in 2005, and it was officially introduced two years later at JavaOne 2007. JavaFX was open-sourced in 2011 and, in 2012, it became part of the Oracle JDK download. 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.[7] In 2018, JavaFX was made a part of the OpenJDK under the OpenJFX project to increase the pace of its development.