More about Swing...

Swing components are Beans, so they can be used in any development environment that supports Beans. Swing provides a full set of UI components. For speed, all the components are lightweight and Swing is written entirely in Java for portability. Swing could be called “orthogonality of use;” that is, once you pick up the general ideas about the library you can apply them everywhere. Primarily because of the Beans naming conventions.

Keyboard navigation is automatic – you can use a Swing application without the mouse, but you don’t have to do any extra programming. Scrolling support is effortless – you simply wrap your component in a JScrollPane as you add it to your form. Other features such as tool tips typically require a single line of code to implement. Swing also supports something called “pluggable look and feel,” which means that the appearance of the UI can be dynamically changed to suit the expectations of users working under different platforms and operating systems. It’s even possible to invent your own look and feel.

Java was developed at Sun Microsystems. Work on Java originally began with the goal of creating a platform-independent language and operating system for consumer electronics. The original intent was to use C++, but as work progressed in this direction, the Java developers realized that they would be better served by creating their own language rather than extending C++. The effort toward consumer electronics led the Java team, then known as First Person, Inc., toward developing hardware and software for the delivery of video-on-demand with Time-Warner.