I'd kind of given up on swing over the years. Everyone has bad memories of traditional Java GUIs. Battleship gray, clunky. Control-C didn't work on Windows, instead it used Unix semantics like Control-Insert for copy and paste. Select a piece of text and right click the mouse. Nothing happens.
If there was one thing which made Eclipse it was developing SWT as a much superior end user experience for Java GUI. With native widgets Eclipse was so much better. Suddenly Ctrl-C works properly on Windows. Select a piece of text and right click the mouse and the context menu comes up. Finally the GUI just looks and works the way we expect. At the time it came out SWT was the obvious and superior choice.
I have to give Sun credit. They didn't give up on JFC. They obviously worked hard to improve it. Now in Java 1.5 they pass the "10 foot test" for the first time. That is, standing 10 feet away from the computer, you can't tell that it's a Java GUI. It looks and acts much smoother now.
One of my favorite programs that I use most every day is Oracle SQL developer. This uses the JDK GUI and it is just fine to work with. It looks and feels great. The standard keyboard and mouse actions all work the way you expect. It's plenty fast.
For the first time developers can consider using swing for serious Java GUI applications.
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