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The wheel is invented over and over again - at least it seems so when looking at any average Swing GUI project.

In many areas there are one or two very well known libraries for things not directly addressed by the standard class library, e.g. hibernate for persistence.

But things seem a little less clear for GUI applications - what are the libraries you see as essential for almost any new GUI project?

I'd propose JGoodies as a start. And for anything involving displaying data graphically maybe JFreeChart. For more sophisticated components SwingX - I have never used it but I hear it often mentioned.

I know there are alternatives to Swing but lets stick with at least for this question.

George Hawkins
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    SwingX is indeed really useful, go try it! – Guillaume Jan 25 '11 at 21:41
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    As the asker obviously I'm sorry this was closed. There are a huge number of minor Swing related libraries that provide this or that. However I think there are hardly any that many people would see as "core". In most other areas there are one or two dominant libraries that over time have risen to be the recognized leaders. Surprisingly, given how much GUI programming is done, there are no similar market leaders here but I thought some consensus might become obvious in the answers about what the significant libraries are. – George Hawkins Jan 26 '11 at 14:21
  • perhaps if you restructure the question as a community wiki, and do the "one lib per answer" style, akin the programming books questions, it can be re-opened. – Carl Jan 26 '11 at 17:00

2 Answers2

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glazed lists for sorting and filtering lists and tables

xhtmlrenderer (flying saucer) for much better XHTML and CSS 2.1 support

swingx as you have mentioned, for the JXCollapsiblePane alone

brian_d
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MigLayout is an awesome layout manager. I use it it on every project I start.

Jide Common layer has some nice free swing widgets.

I82Much
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