One of my duties as an undergraduate research student, is to build a Java front end for one of the tools my professor has.

I checked out a few of the choices available for a Java GUI, and I eventually settled on Swing.

People seem to either love or hate it, and I’m curious why.

I picked swing as it was the most familiar, logic-wise to me. I’ve been polluted by Tkinter, sorry. But Swing makes sense to me. LayoutManagers, Buttons, Panels, Containers, Components… it makes sense.

The only difference I see between Tkinter and Swing, is that Tkinter uses callbacks, and Swing uses Listeners. But even Listeners make sense, as it is after all an event-based architecture. I can do implement a Listener any way I want, in any customized component, or even separate classes.

Swing gives me flexibility without imposing massive layers of abstraction on me(unlike a few other culprits I’ve seen… *whistles*).

But I want to know what you like, or dislike about Swing, or any of the other Java GUIs.