Introduction to Standard Widget Toolkit (I)
28 December 2007AWT (the Abstract Windowing Toolkit) was the first Java GUI toolkit, introduced with JDK 1.0 as one component of the Sun Microsystems Java standard. The relatively primitive AWT wrapped Java code around native (operating system-supplied) objects to create GUI elements, such as menus, windows and buttons. AWT was a very thin wrapper around native widgets, exposing developers to platform specific code, quirks and bugs that limited how portable and native-looking applications could be across different computing platforms.
Swing was the next generation toolkit introduced by Sun into J2SE 1.2, and was more object-oriented than AWT. Swing GUI elements are 100% Java, with no native code — instead of wrapping around native APIs, Swing calls low level operating system routines to draw the GUI elements by itself.
Around this time, IBM was developing their VisualAge development integrated development environment (IDE), coded in Smalltalk. They decided to open-source the project, which led to the development of Eclipse, intended to compete against other IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio. Eclipse is written in Java, and IBM developers, deciding that they needed a toolkit that had “native look and feel” and “native performance” created SWT as a Swing replacement.
The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a graphical widget toolkit for the Java platform originally developed by IBM and maintained now by the Eclipse Foundation in tandem with the Eclipse IDE. It is an alternative to the AWT and Swing Java GUI toolkits provided by Sun Microsystems as part of the Java standard.
SWT is written in Java. To display GUI elements, the SWT implementation accesses the native GUI libraries of the operating system using JNI (Java Native Interface) in a manner that is similar to those programs written using operating system-specific APIs. Programs that call SWT are portable, but the implementation of the toolkit, despite the fact that it is written in Java, is unique for each platform.
The toolkit is licensed under the Eclipse Public License, an Open Source Initiative approved open source license.
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