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First and foremost: A statusbar. Sure you can use a label, but it looks like crap, and includes a lot of manual labor for something that all other widget toolkits have.

I would also like a font chooser dialog. Yes I actually have had several projects where one was needed and I had to use some unstable custom dialog I found on the internet.

And what about a dock like in QT? A lot of large program uses such solutions.

...and although its not directly a Swing widget issue, I would also like to see better graphics capabilities built in. For instance support for SVGs and vector graphics, but this is one of the features that are closed and will not be fixed. And why not kill the redrawing issues when first looking into the graphics.

I could also go on and on about the shortcomings of the existing widgets...Java is suppose to be rapid application development (or at least compared to other languages like C and C++), but lets face it: even C++ provide less work nowadays with QT and all. In Swing you have to do a lot of stuff manually because of its limitations, while for instance QT have all that stuff built-in. Dont wanna sound like a QT fanboy or anything, but it is my best example next to .NET :p

This is just my opinion based on my own experiences and the experiences of the people around me. But as most the people I have used to program with on projects and such have left Java because of the Swing issues to go play with .NET I have strong feelings about this issues. The truth is that if people can make the same, if not better, quality apps that I can in less time and with better behavior using .NET, then I may be forced to make the big switch myself. Its all about staying in business.

Edited 2007-12-03 21:56