Java GUI for text and document editor

I wonder if anyone could recommend a good Java library that could be used for developing the GUI for an advanced text and document editor (think of something like Word, Quark XPress...).

I am supernew to Java but experienced in PHP; just need some general indications so that I get on the right track - thanks.

Thomas

Well the first question you want to answer is if this is to be a web or standalone client?

If you want to build a standalone client in Java i guess you could use Swing, which is part of Java SE. You could also look into JavaFX, a framework under development, that enables far easier GUI development than Swing does. But it might be a little to unstable yet.

If you want to build a webclient in Java I can recommend the Google Web Toolkit, GWT which offers a Java API for coding JavaScript. How nice is that! No more dirty .js files (written by an incompetent human)!

Thank you for your reply, this is helpful advice of the sort I was hoping for.

But I am not sure what you mean by a webclient...
The application we want to build, let´s call it X, will be located on a personal computer (like a Word program). And while it is not meant to access web pages per se, our plan is to create another Java application, Y, that will be put on web servers and the idea is that X and Y should be able to communicate with each other, like sending data back and forth between each other.

Thomas

Well ok, maybe webclient was the wrong word, what I meant was;
- Is the client application going to run inside a web browser or is it an application, like MS Word itself?

You said in your comment that X will be located on a personal computer like a Word program, so that sounds like a standalone application, not a webapp!
You could of course use a mix of the two, the Applet, which loads and runs inside the browser but is a regular Java Swing application. Note that such a solution, just like the true browser client, has limited or no access to disk on the host computer. So if you plan on persisting the documents locally on the users machine then such a solution is not very handy.