JAVA GUI: SWT JFACE and SWING

SWT（Standard Widget Toolkit），最初由IBM开发的一套用于Java的图形用户界面系统，用来与Swing竞争。开源集成开发环境Eclipse就是用Java和SWT开发的。

 

JFace is defined by the Eclipse project as "a UI toolkit that provides helper classes for developing UI features that can be tedious to implement."[1] SWT is an open source widget toolkit for Java designed to provide efficient, portable access to the user-interface facilities of the operating systems on which it is implemented.

It is a layer that sits on top of the raw widget system, and provides classes for handling common UI programming tasks. It brings model view controller programming to the Standard Widget Toolkit.
1.Provides Viewer classes that handle the tedious tasks of populating, sorting, filtering, and updating widgets
2.Provides Actions to allow users to define their own behavior and to assign that behavior to specific components, e.g. menu items, tool items, push buttons, etc.
3.Provides registries that hold Images and Fonts
4.Defines standard dialogs and wizards, and defines a framework for building complex interactions with the user
5.Its primary goal is to free the developer up, letting the developer focus on the implementation of his or her specific application without having to be concerned with the underlying widget system or solving problems that are common in almost all UI applications.
6.A primary concern of the Eclipse group when developing JFace was that under no circumstances did they want to hide the SWT component implementation from the programmer. JFace is completely dependent on SWT, but SWT is not dependent on JFace. Furthermore, the Eclipse Workbench is built on both JFace and SWT; in some instances, it bypasses JFace and accesses SWT directly.

The Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) is Java's original platform-independent windowing, graphics, and user-interface widget toolkit. The AWT is now part of the Java Foundation Classes (JFC) — the standard API for providing a graphical user interface (GUI) for a Java program. AWT is also the GUI toolkit for a number of Java ME profiles. For example, Connected Device Configuration profiles require Java runtimes on mobile telephones to support AWT.

 

Swing is the primary Java GUI widget toolkit. It is part of Oracle's Java Foundation Classes (JFC) — an API for providing a graphical user interface (GUI) for Java programs.

Swing was developed to provide a more sophisticated set of GUI components than the earlier Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT). Swing provides a native look and feel that emulates the look and feel of several platforms, and also supports a pluggable look and feel that allows applications to have a look and feel unrelated to the underlying platform. It has more powerful and flexible components than AWT. In addition to familiar components such as buttons, check boxes and labels, Swing provides several advanced components such as tabbed panel, scroll panes, trees, tables, and lists.

Unlike AWT components, Swing components are not implemented by platform-specific code. Instead they are written entirely in Java and therefore are platform-independent. The term "lightweight" is used to describe such an element.[1]