Swing's Successes
Every once in a while, a "Swing has failed" cry would break out on the web. The latest instance of said cry is A Java Today article by Joshua Marinacci.
Inevitably, someone will make a comment saying, essentially, "Look at IntelliJ's IDEA! It's Swing."
Let me just say up front that I don't agree with the "Swing has failed" camp. I liken them to the "Math is too hard" camp. And I suggest that they change their chant to "I have failed at Swing." And just because you have failed at Swing, doesn't mean that everyone else must also fail at Swing, for clearly success has been attained with Swing.
The key to success with Swing, as I witnessed in my latest project, is to take advantage of the capabilities of Swing, especially patterns and frameworks.
As an example, let me pick apart Joshua's first point:
Swing apps are slow to build. Building a Swing GUI takes time because you have to do it programmatically.
Isn't it odd that a programmer should complain about something being programmable? The fact that Swing GUIs are programmable is a huge opportunity for programmers because you can build higher level abstractions on top of it.
It can be done. It can be done to the point where making changes to the GUI appearance takes only seconds.