A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
Almost all modern GUI toolkits got a statusbar widget/component. Swing does not. Creating a JStatusBar would bring Swing one step closer to a complete GUI toolkit.

My suggestion is to have a setJStatusBar in the JFrame class, and a JStatusBar class where you can add any Component and JComponent.

JUSTIFICATION :
"All" other toolkits have this feature. Among these are:

- QT4
- GTK+2
- wxWidgets
- FLTK (?)
- Motif (?)
- .NET/Windows forms
- Win32 common controls

Why should Java/Swing be any worse than any of these?

There are possible to create statusbar-ish behaviour, but it will look bad, and you wont get the "resize" art at the lower right corner (or other look and feel) as with the other toolkits.

It is a shame that Swing should not provide such essential functionality.