Trail: Graphical User Interfaces

How do you write a program in the Java programming language with a graphical user interface? The short answer — the Swing toolkit! This trail gives you a brief overview of the graphical capabilities of the core Java platform with a special focus on Swing.

This trail, part of The Java Tutorial, does not show how to implement these features. For a "how-to" on using the Swing toolkit, see Creating a GUI With JFC/Swing .

Trail icon A Brief Introduction to Swing provides a high-level table of the capabilities provided by the Swing toolkit and other Java Foundation Classes. A demo is provided that showcases many of these capabilities.

Trail icon Swing Features explains the basic features of Swing, such as drag and drop, internationalization, pluggable look and feel, and provides a visual list of the components available in the Swing toolkit.

If you are interested in building your UI using JavaFX, see the JavaFX 2.0 Documentation.


Problems with the examples? Try Compiling and Running the Examples: FAQs.
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