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Samuel Viana
Samuel Viana

Posted on • Originally published at codehouse.digfish.org

Select the best GUI toolkit - part 5: Java Swing

GUI screenshot

NOTE: this the fifth part of a series. The previous article was about .NET Windows Forms. You can find the article here.
Java Swing is one of the oldest GUI toolkits made by SUN, the creator of the language (the first was AWT) and had vast acknowledgment at the time. Another frameworks followed, like SWT made by IBM for their Eclipse IDE. Nowadays, there is also Thinlet and Pivot. At the time of creating, Swing had the purpose of providing one toolkit for all platforms, where the framework provided a look and feel so the application would look like as if it were native to the end user.
For this project i use the nowadays most used Java IDE, Jetbrains Intellij . Oracle, the trademarketeer of Java, still provides the oldest Netbeans IDE and there is also the Eclipse created initially by IBM.
Drag and Drop is supported and you can find the implementation in the FileListTransferHandler.java file.
This port of App Menu Lanucher were, up to now, the only one that were able to run in Windows, MacOs and Linux wihout specific modifications. The UI aesthetics are not the most pleasant ones, but Java beats other development platforms by its long and stable support for almost all OSes.
The source code for this project is available at GitHub.

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