Displaying errors in a GUI

Does anyone have any ideas on how to display errors in a Swing GUI application if the user does not want to see dialogs?

Thanks.

Use the "status bar"?

What's that? Is that an error of the application designed for displaying
errors? Is there another application I can look at that uses something
similar?

Status bars aren't really designed for error messages. If you can't use dialogs then I would either use in line error messages using a simple JLabel. You can set the font so that it is red, etc. If you don't have room per say for in line error messages, then create a message header on your form of some sort that can display error messages above all the components. Really, it's not that different than displaying error messages in web pages, if you are familiar with that at all.

Take a look at the JGoodies Validation Demo. It will give you some good ideas. You may even want to use that package.

I'll second JGoodies Validation. You can either display all validation errors in a summary component or change the components that have errors such as setting a text field background to red.