http://onlywire.com/r/48966831 one of the best swing tutorial I have come across in internet.Its a task based tutorial and teaches how to use Jlist by first taking a real life example of JList. here are some important point of JList in Swing:1) JList is a GUI element available in javax.swing package which allows selection of one more element. Internally JList is backed up by two models: ListModel for holding data and ListSelectionModel for handling selection. JList also allows custom rendering via ListCellRenderer which can be used to draw a specific cell in customize manner.
Source and full article: Java swing tutorial: Learning JList with code example