History
AWT (the Abstract Window Toolkit) was the first Java GUI toolkit, introduced with JDK 1.0 as one component of the Sun Microsystems Java platform. The original AWT was a simple Java wrapper around native (operating system-supplied) widgets such as menus, windows and buttons.
Swing was the next generation GUI toolkit introduced by Sun in J2SE 1.2. Swing was developed in order to provide a richer set of GUI components than AWT. Swing GUI elements are 100% Java with no native code: instead of wrapping native GUI components, Swing draws its own components by using Java2D to call low level operating system drawing routines.
The roots of SWT go back to work that Object Technology International, or OTI, did in the 1990s when creating multiplatform, portable, native widget interfaces for Smalltalk (originally for OTI Smalltalk, which became IBM Smalltalk in 1993). IBM Smalltalk's Common Widget layer provided fast, native access to multiple platform widget sets while still providing a common API without suffering the "lowest common denominator" problem typical of other portable graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits. IBM was developing VisualAge, an integrated development environment (IDE) written in Smalltalk. They decided to open-source the project, which led to the development of Eclipse, intended to compete against other IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio. Eclipse is written in Java, and IBM developers, deciding that they needed a toolkit that had "native look and feel" and "native performance", created SWT as a Swing replacement.
Read more about this topic: Standard Widget Toolkit
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)