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 .

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.

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.