Here are some difference betn AWT and Swing.

1.AWT components are called HeavyWeight component and Swings are called ligth weight component because swing components sits on the top of AWT components and do the work.
2.swings components are made in purely java and they are platform independent whereas AWT compoents are platform dependent.
3.we can have different look and feel in Swing whereas this feature is not supported in AWT.
4.Swing has many advanced features like JTabel,Jtabbed pane
which is not available in awt..

Also.
Swing components are called "lightweight" because they do not require a
native OS object to implement their functionality. JDialog and JFrame are
heavyweight, because they do have a peer. So components like JButton,
JTextArea, etc., are lightweight because they do not have an OS peer.


With AWT, you have 21
"peers" (one for each control and one for the dialog itself). A "peer" is a
widget provided by the operating system, such as a button object or an entry
field object.

With Swing, you would have only one peer, the operating system's window
object. All of the buttons, entry fields, etc. are drawn by the Swing
package on the drawing surface provided by the window object. This is the
reason that Swing has more code. It has to draw the button or other control
and implement its behavior instead of relying on the host operating system
to perform those functions.

Several consequences result from this difference between AWT and Swing. AWT
is a thin layer of code on top of the OS, whereas Swing is much larger.
Swing also has very much richer functionality. Using AWT, you have to
implement a lot of things yourself, while Swing has them built in. For
GUI-intensive work, AWT feels very primitive to work with compared to Swing.
Because Swing implements GUI functionality itself rather than relying on the
host OS, it can offer a richer environment on all platforms Java runs on.
AWT is more limited in supplying the same functionality on all platforms
because not all platforms implement the same-looking controls in the same
ways.

Swing components are called "lightweight" because they do not require a
native OS object to implement their functionality. JDialog and JFrame are
heavyweight, because they do have a peer. So components like JButton,
JTextArea, etc., are lightweight because they do not have an OS peer.