Swing Design Goals

The overall goal for the Swing project was:
To build a set of extensible GUI components to enable developers to more rapidly develop powerful Java front ends for commercial applications.

To this end, the Swing team established a set of design goals early in the project that drove the resulting architecture. These guidelines mandated that Swing would:

 

1) Be implemented entirely in Java to promote cross-platform consistency and easier maintenance.

2) Provide a single API capable of supporting multiple look-and-feels so that developers and end-users would not be locked into a single look-and-feel. pluggable look-and-feel architecture.

3) Enable the power of model-driven programming without requiring it in the highest-level API. seperable model architecture.

4) Adhere to JavaBeans design principles to ensure that components behave well in IDEs and builder tools.

5) Provide compatibility with AWT APIs where there is overlapping, to leverage the AWT knowledge base and ease porting.