Author Topic: SWT for Java UI's  (Read 12307 times)

Perspective

  • badfish
  • Jackass In Charge
  • Posts: 4635
  • Karma: +64/-22
    • http://jeff.bagu.org
SWT for Java UI's
« on: April 11, 2005, 09:49:58 PM »
The next time you write a java app with a user interface, consider how horrible it will look if you use AWT, or how damn ugly it will be if you use Swing. There is a multi-platform alternative! SWT!

SWT provides java bindings to the native widget toolkit for the environment you are using. This means your java app will look the same as an app written in C/C++ which uses the actual widget toolkit for that system. If a widget doesn't exist in the native toolkit, it is emulated. There is currently support for Windows, linux/gtk, linux/motif, MacOS/carbon, solaris/gtk, solaris/motif, ....

Best of all, the SWT library is open source and freely distributable! The source can be obtained from dev.eclipse.org (cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@dev.eclipse.org:/home/eclipse)

Some popular projects using SWT include Eclipse, an IDE; and Azureus, a bit-torrent client.

I highly recommend SWT, its just plain bad-ass  :thumbsup:
not enough people know about, so i thought id put up a thread to draw some attention. Questions? Comments? post 'em up!

incognito

  • In the Abis
  • Jackass IV
  • Posts: 544
  • Karma: +15/-20
SWT for Java UI's
« Reply #1 on: April 26, 2005, 08:45:32 PM »
I use eclipse at work every single day, and to tell you the truth it's mighty sweet compared to that bloated, and heavy netbeans crap. Anyways, eclipse still uses C++ ;) to make it work faster. So it's still faster (SWT)  than that other swing crap.

Perspective

  • badfish
  • Jackass In Charge
  • Posts: 4635
  • Karma: +64/-22
    • http://jeff.bagu.org
SWT for Java UI's
« Reply #2 on: April 27, 2005, 12:08:53 PM »
yeah, its all done throught JNI, so the widgets are invoked and controlled through java bindings to the underlying C/C++ implementations. The coolest part is that SWT is just a standard API no matter what platform your on. So, despite how different the widget set API's are (say, win32 vs GTK) your SWT code is the same and everything is handled by the library.

Eclipse only uses C/C++ for the JNI code to provide the bindings to the native widget set. Everything else is pure Java.