SWT - Standard Widget Toolkit

SWT is the UI library used by Eclipse. SWT provides the some rich UI components on several platforms. The native widgets of the OS are accessed by the SWT framework via JNI. If a widget is not available on a certain platform, SWT emulates the unavailable widget.

SWT is from design similar to AWT but AWT does not provide widgets if they are available on all platform, therefore the AWT widget library is very small.

The key components of SWT applications are the classes "Display" and "Shell". A Shell represents a window. Displays are responsible from managing event loops and controlling communication between the UI thread and other threads. Every SWT application requires at least one Display and one or more Shell instances. The main shell gets as a default parameter a Display as construtor argument.