spring-boot-awt-gui-demo

Demonstration on how to create an AWT GUI in Spring Boot.

The project contains the needed tweaks to your Spring Boot configuration to allow an AWT or Swing GUI application to run in Spring Boot.

The changes are essentially the following:

Disable Headless Mode

By default a Spring Boot application is set to run in headless mode. Meaning that it can be run on a server or other environment where there is no graphical interface (the 'head') available.

.headless(false)

Without doing this, any attempt to instantiate an AWT GUI element will cause a java.awt.HeadlessException to be thrown.

Disable Web Server Mode

Spring Boot makes the assumption that you will be creating a Web Application. By default it will bundle Tomcat with your application, unless you add Tomcat to your classpath. For most GUI applications you won't be using Tomcat at all, so we need to completely disable the Web Server behaviour.

.web(WebApplicationType.NONE)

Older versions of Spring Boot expected a boolean, in which case you would have passed a false value.

Use the AWT EventQueue Thread

java.awt.EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
           @Override
            public void run() {
                frame.setVisible(true);
            }
        });

This isn't specific to Spring Boot and applies to any AWT application.