Widgets are the building blocks of java user interfaces. Learn all about them in this chapter from SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Volume 1.
Java Widget Fundamentals
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
If you are considering getting a book on SWT, I wouldn’t recommend this one.
It’s little more than a printed API doc (which is available online).
Just a warning to other readers not familiar with Java and it’s GUI facilities.
Java ships as standard with the original AWT (Advanced Windowing Toolkit), and on-top of that the more modern Swing toolkit.
The widgets described in this article are SWT which is IBM’s Java widget toolkit shipped as part of Eclipse. It is effectively a third-party library, not made obvious by the summary and a little misleading by the title.
SWT is rather interesting however.
Well, not exactly: SWING is NOT built on top of AWT. The first is a full Java windowing toolkit, while the second is a mere bridge to the underlying native GUI.
Swing is built on top of Java2D, but HAS AWT dependences…
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Let’s vote for new swing on top of jogl!