What is "swing"

Swing is a Toolkit widget for use with Java. It is compatible with Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT), but it works in a totally different way. The Swing API seeks to render draw on its own all components, rather than delegate this task to the operating system, as most other GUI Apis work.

Because it is a higher-level API, that is, more abstraction, less approximation of the operating system Apis, it has much less performace than other graphic Apis and consumes more RAM in general. However, it is much more complete, and the programs that use Swing have a very similar appearance, regardless of the operating system used.

Swing runs on a single Thread and any access to its components must happen on the special Thread called Event Dispatch Thread or EDT).

General information

• Overview of Swing architecture
• Javadoc (JDK9)
• Definition of Swing on Wikipedia
• Swing Usage Tutorial(official)