There are netbeans projects for the client demos.

% ls src/demo/share/nbproject
README.txt jfc project.xml
% ls src/demo/share/nbproject/jfc
FileChooserDemo Notepad TransparentRuler
Font2DTest SampleTree
Metalworks TableExample

These seem to be interesting to someone who wants to work with these in netbeans without building the JDK - which has a target "make demos" which does this for you.

These haven't been updated in a long time, and when the option of running these demos as applets was removed, these files weren't updated and still look to have that support.
It is possible they still work for the main program only case, but they should be updated.

Also when a couple of demos (SwingSet, J2Demo) were open-sourced the nbproject files were not .. and no one has complained.

So may be no one cares and we should just remove them ?
Or we could add simple local make scripts instead ?