The Spring Framework's applicability in the context of Swing seems to be underhighlighted, at least when one looks around on the web. What does Spring have to offer in this context? Rather than a highly theoretical discussion, let's look at a complete, compilable example, step by step, and draw our conclusions from there.
The goal of this project is to provide a small and cohesive set of powerful UI components with functionality similar to or superseding that of Vista Explorer and Office 2007. The components provide consistent visuals under the existing core and third-party look-and-feels, respect the DPI settings of the user desktop and follow the core Swing guidelines in the external APIs and the internal implementation details.
Swing has lot of components built-in but still some are missing. This project provides the developer community with these missing components, components inspired (copied?!) from modern user interfaces.
Éric Piel, and A. Gonzalez-Sanchez. SINTER '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ESEC/FSE workshop on Software integration and evolution @ runtime, page 3--10. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2009)