This toolkit was called Swing during development and is still called that a lot. They have gotten good response to this toolkit from the developer community, averaging about 300 e-mail messages per day. Tom Ball talked about the history of Swing, Amy Fouler spoke about the architecture, and Hans Meuller wrapped up.
Swing was developed initially because awt was insufficient and had problems. The JFC was designed to be a lightweight UI framework which is 100% Pure Java, provided as a set of components with plugable application services, but not a framework. Swing uses services from the awt, and its layered to make development easier; its a big toolkit....
There is still a need for higher level documentation. They've added complex containers, including tables and trees. There are standard dialogs provided, and there are complex text editing objects. Swing components have properties which can be changed to modify how the component behaves. They collapsed the model/view/controller (MVC) design paradigm into a model/controller paradigm, with the view and controller parts integrated. There is on UI class per component that defines its look and feel; there are four look and feels provided with Java 1.2: