In this chapter, we started by looking at how to create Swing applications within NetBeans. We then continued and looked at creating Swing frames and saw how these could easily be created from ready built templates. We also learned to design forms by adding and arranging components onto a design surface. We then saw how to control the properties, bindings, events, and custom code for all the components we put on a form.

Finally, we took a brief look at JavaFX and saw how this differs from Swing. We saw that Scene Builder can be used to provide similar GUI editing facilities to NetBeans and got to know that a company called Gluon, instead of Oracle, now provides binaries for Scene Builder.

In the next chapter, we'll move on to the next level of the application stack and see how we can effectively create a business layer for our applications.