swing-forms

The swing-forms library allows developers to very quickly and easily lay out forms without having to write manual layout code with GridBagLayout and GridBagConstraints. Most commonly-used UI components are wrapped in swing-forms, allowing you to simply instantiate them and add them to a FormPanel, with configurable validation and optional form actions.

Almost all swing-forms classes are extensible by design, allowing you to quickly build your own custom form fields if the built-in form fields don't meet your needs.

What can I do with swing-forms?

The swing-forms library wraps most of the common input components into easy-to-use wrapper classes and hides much of the complexity of using them. Included example form field implementations are:

• Checkbox
• Color picker (with support for solid colors and for color gradients)
• Combo box (editable and non-editable variants)
• File chooser (with optional image preview panel)
• Directory chooser
• Static label fields
• Number pickers (spinners)
• Text input fields (single-line and multiline supported)
• Password input fields
• Multi-select list fields
• ImageList fields, with drag-and-drop support for adding images
• Panel fields (for rendering custom stuff)

In the next few sections, we'll take a tour of the features provided by swing-forms, and we will be making use of these features in most of the rest of this documentation, because many of the other features included in swing-extras build on top of swing-forms.

Brief history

swing-forms was originally developed and distributed as a separate library, but because of the large overlap between swing-form and swing-extras, the decision was made to absorb all of swing-forms into swing-extras as of the 2.0 release in April 2025.