Java Swing, Second Edition

When Java was first released, its user interface facilities were a significant weakness. The Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) was part of the JDK from the beginning, but it really wasn't sufficient to support a complex user interface. It supported everything you could do in an HTML form and provided free-standing frames, menus, and a few other objects, but you'd be hard-pressed to implement an application as complex as Quicken or Lotus Notes. AWT also had its share of portability problems; it relied heavily on the runtime platform's native user interface components, and it wasn't always possible to hide differences in the way these components behaved.