This series is dedicated to the state of JVM desktop frameworks. After having had a look at Swing last week, this post focuses on the Standard Widget Toolkit.
What Is SWT?
SWT originated with the Eclipse project as an IDE. The developers built a dedicated framework for Eclipse in which to build their graphic components. Swing and SWT have widely different designs. Swing implements the drawing of widgets in Java from scratch. SWT is a thin wrapper API that relies on native graphic objects. This has two main benefits: