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
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