SWT Creates Fast, Native-looking GUIs for Your Java Apps

ince Sun Microsystems released the first version of Java, the industry has been displeased with the way Java's front-end development toolkit works. Though Swing appeased some developers with its look-and-feel, the interfaces one could build with it still lacked the right look and its performance did not meet the requirements of large-scale, industrial-strength applications.

To address this shortcoming, some folks like IBM set out to develop an entirely new toolkit that has a widget framework similar to Java's Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) but is entirely dependent on the native operating system's GUI widgets. The result was the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), an open source Java graphical user interface (GUI) toolkit comprised of a widget set and a graphics library. Unlike AWT, SWT relies on the underlying operating system's native widgets, even if they are not present on other platforms. As a result, SWT enables client-side Java applications to assume the appearance and performance of traditional native desktop applications, albeit at the expense of portability.