21.Swing in JAVA

Swing is the primary Java GUI widget toolkit. 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 native 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 box 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. The term "lightweight" is used to describe such an element.

Features of Swings 

Extensible

Swing is a highly modular-based 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 using Java's inheritance mechanism.

Swing is a component-based framework, whose components are all ultimately derived from the javax.swing.JComponent class. Swing objects asynchronously fire events, have bound properties, and respond to a documented set of methods specific to the component. Swing components are Java Beans components, compliant with the Java Beans Component Architecture specifications.

Customizable

Given the programmatic rendering model of the Swing framework, fine control over the details of rendering of a component is possible in Swing. As a general pattern, the visual representation of a Swing component is a composition of a standard set of elements, such as a border, inset, decorations, and other properties. Typically, users will programmatically customize a standard Swing component (such as a JTable) by assigning specific borders, colors, backgrounds, opacities, etc. The core component will then use these properties to render itself. However, it is also completely possible to create unique GUI controls with highly customized visual representation.

Configurable

Swing's heavy reliance on runtime mechanisms and indirect composition patterns allows it to respond at run time to fundamental changes in its settings. For example, a Swing-based application is capable of hot swapping its user-interface during runtime. Furthermore, users can provide their own look and feel implementation, which allows for uniform changes in the look and feel of existing Swing applications without any programmatic change to the application code.

Lightweight UI

Swing's high level of flexibility is reflected in its inherent ability to override the native host operating system (OS)'s GUI controls for displaying itself. Swing "paints" its controls using the Java 2D APIs, rather than calling a native user interface toolkit. Thus, a Swing component does not have a corresponding native OS GUI component, and is free to render itself in any way that is possible with the underlying graphics GUIs.

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