| Graphics work in Java has a long and glorious past, and, let's hope, a similar future. It started with the very basic AWT, moved on through the powerful Swing package, and now stands on the threshold of the SWT age. 7.1.1 AWT The AWT, Java's first attempt at a GUI toolkit, was written in a matter of weeks. It lets Java developers display windows with various controls like text boxes and buttons . AWT GUIs were easy to develop, and they used the underlying operating system's controls themselvesfor example, in Windows, you'd see a Windows text box. On the Mac, you'd see a Mac text box. Some operating systems had a different control set from other operating systems, which meant that Sun only implemented those controls common to all operating systems Java was targeted to, and that limited AWT to a set of relatively simple controls. 7.1.2 Swing To address the growing needs of developers, Java introduced Swing, which provides non-native implementations of higher level controls like trees, tables, and text. This provides a great deal of functionality, but it makes applications developed in Swing stand out as being different and very Java-specific. Sun added a "look-and-feel" emulation (which we saw at work in the previous chapter) to help applications look more like the operating system they're running on, but they couldn't keep up with all the operating system releases (such as Windows ME, 2000, XP, and so on). In addition, because the GUI was implemented in Java and not natively in the operating system, Swing response time was poor compared to native applications. 7.1.3 SWT SWT addresses many of the issues here by providing a set of widgets that make use of native controls (through the Java Native Interface, JNI) when such controls are available. Otherwise, SWT creates its own controls as needed for those that don't have an operating system counterpart . This does mean that native code is needed to support each operating system, but so far, IBM has been able to provide that and stay up-to-date. Additionally, SWT comes with Eclipse, so it is a fit topic for our discussion. SWT is substantial and feature-rich, as you'd expect if it's intended to replace AWT and Swing. We're going to get an introduction to SWT in this and the next chapter, and it turns out that you really don't need in-depth SWT knowledge to create powerful and useful SWT applications. All you need to know about are widgets (the user -interface elements you use in SWT), SWT layouts (which let you position those widgets), and SWT events. We're going to see plenty of examples, starting immediately, to see how all these work in SWT.  | SWT is being ported to more and more graphical environments all the time. Currently supported are: Windows, Linux GTK, Linux Motif, Solaris Motif, AIX Motif, HPUX Motif, Photon QNX, and Mac OS X. | |
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