Where are Swing applications used?

Question

Are Swing applications really used nowadays? I don\'t find a place where they are used. Is it okay to skip the AWT and Swing package (I learned a bit of the basics though)?

Answer 1

Geertjan Wielenga often blogs about applications based on the NetBeans platform, and therefore Swing. The applications range across the board from rather small esoteric applications to very large, mission-critical systems (Boeing Aircraft comes to mind). Many of the enterprise-level applications that Geertjan misses are mentioned on Planet NetBeans. It seems like every few weeks there is an announcement or description of such a program.

As noted above, lots of tools use Swing including the IntelliJ IDEA IDE, a favorite. I'm surprised no one else mentioned it.

Sun also used to maintain a Swing Sightings web site, but it hasn't been updated in a few years.

Where I work, Swing is used in the presentation layer for a very large document management system. In my own development experience I've used Swing for desktop applications in the areas of image processing, device control (video, motors, etc.), math, statistics, and medical devices.

BTW, I agree about the slowness of file choosers. But there are lots of alternatives that will use the native file chooser. It can just be a bit jarring if the L&F's don't match up very well.

EDIT: Oh, and as others have mentioned, it's very easy to use Swing from other languages on the JVM. With Clojure, for example, it is even easier to use than in Java, in my opinion.