Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins

Chapter 34. Standard Widget Toolkit — SWT

SWT provides a common set of widgets like buttons, menus, trees, and tables. The most succinct definition of SWT is given on the components home page:^[1] The SWT component is designed to provide efficient, portable access to the user-interface facilities of the operating systems on which it is implemented. To achieve this goal SWT implements a thin layer on top of the operating system's native widgets. When a widget isn't available on a particular platform SWT implements the widget in Java.

SWT doesn't have any dependencies on the rest of Eclipse. You can use it independently of Eclipse (see Figure 34.1).

Figure 34.1. SWT

One general design goal of SWT is the orthogonality of the API. Once you understand ...