Questions tagged [swing]

Swing is a GUI toolkit that is packaged with the standard Java SDK (since 1.2). Recently it is no longer being actively enhanced and has largely been superseded by JavaFX.

General information

• Swing Architecture Overview
• Javadoc (JDK8)
• Wikipedia on Swing
• The Swing tutorial

Specialized articles

• Painting in AWT and Swing: The Paint Methods
• Troubleshooting Swing

Essential topics in Swing programming

Layout managers: Layout managers are responsible for determining the size and position of components in a Container.

• Layout manager tutorial: complete tutorial on how to use layout managers
• Visual guide to layout managers: overview of the different layout managers and their main features
• Nesting layouts: allows designing almost any UI

Swing threading rules: Swing is single threaded and any access to Swing components should happen on the Swing thread (the Event Dispatch Thread or EDT).

• Start with the Concurrency in Swing tutorial
• Detect EDT violations using one of the approaches cited here
• Use SwingWorker to perform lengthy operations in the background and update the UI on the EDT
• Use a Swing Timer for animation