Bernie Spang

In his editorial "Swing Is Swinging Java out of the Desktop" (JDJ, Vol. 7, issue 10) Alan Williamson lamented the current state of Swing and AWT for building competitive desktop applications. One alternative he mentioned is a technology called SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) that was developed as part of the Eclipse Project (www.eclipse.org). If you're wondering why the Eclipse community, led by IBM, developed SWT instead of using J2SE's AWT or Swing classes, here's the reason. Eclipse is an open, universal platform for building and integrating development tools. The users of development tools are, typically, developers and they are a demanding lot. So Eclipse had to be designed to deliver a high-performance user experience and integrate well with native operating systems. In the early development phase of the project, the Eclipse developers found that AWT was too li... (more)