Swing Features

Swing provides many features for writing large-scale applications in Java. Here is an overview of some of the more popular features.

Pluggable Look-and-Feels

One of the most exciting aspects of the Swing classes is the ability to dictate the L&F of each of the components, even resetting the L&F at runtime. L&Fs have become an important issue in GUI development over the past 10 years. Many users are familiar with the Motif style of user interface, which was common in Windows 3.1 and is still in wide use on Unix platforms. Microsoft created a more optimized L&F in their Windows 95/98/NT/2000 operating systems. In addition, the Macintosh computer system has its own carefully designed L&F, which most Apple users feel comfortable with.
 
Swing is capable of emulating several L&Fs and currently supports the Windows, Unix Motif, and “native” Java Metal L&Fs. Mac OS X comes with full support for its own L&F based on Apple’s Aqua Human Interface Guidelines, although you can still access Metal if you prefer. In addition, Swing allows the user to switch L&Fs at runtime without having to close the application. This way, a user can experiment to see which L&F is best for her with instantaneous feedback. (In practice, nobody really does this, but it’s still pretty cool from a geeky point of view.) And, if you’re feeling really ambitious as a developer (perhaps a game developer), you can create your own L&F for each one of the Swing components!

Lightweight Components

Most Swing components are lightweight. In the purest sense, this means that components are not dependent on native peers to render themselves. Instead, they use simplified graphics primitives to paint themselves on the screen and can even allow portions to be transparent.
 
The ability to create lightweight components first emerged in JDK 1.1, although the majority of AWT components did not take advantage of it. Prior to that, Java programmers had no choice but to subclass java.awt.Canvas or java.awt.Panel if they wished to create their own components. With both classes, Java allocated an opaque peer object from the underlying operating system to represent the component, forcing each component to behave as if it were its own window, thereby taking on a rectangular, solid shape. Hence, these components earned the name “heavyweight” because they frequently held extra baggage at the native level that Java did not use.