While functional and easy to use, AWT had its drawbacks. Components rendered slowly, there was a disappointingly limited number of prebuilt components, and the ones that were provided were not easily ...

First, the button component in Listing 2 was written using the AWT (Abstract Window Toolkit) component set, because the Swing component set didn’t yet exist when the JDK 1.1 first came out.

It's easy to create a basic Swing desktop UI as the JDK provides everything you need -- no external dependencies are required in a Maven project, for example. Using Swing components instead of AWT ...