Swing is Java's lightweight widget toolkit for creating desktop applications. When Java was first released, the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) was the standard. This was a platform-independent API where each component that was drawn by AWT depended upon the corresponding native component. AWT was the standard GUI toolkit for Java until J2SE 1.2 was released. With this release of Java, Swing was promoted as the GUI toolkit of choice. Swing provides many advantages over AWT, most particularly that it does not depend upon native GUI components like its predecessor AWT did. In fact, all the standard Swing components are all written in pure Java and do not depend upon native controls. Swing is, therefore, considered a lightweight GUI toolkit in comparison to AWT.

Swing support has been available within NetBeans since version 3. Swing support was completely rewritten in NetBeans 5 with the addition of project Matisse. This project was the new GUI builder that was added to...