Compare SWT with SWING

Question

• Is swt faster than swing?
• Where can i get good tutorials
  about swt?
• it easy to migrate from swing
  to swt?

Answer 1

There's a comprehensive tutorial here which takes you from 'Hello World' up.

Swing and SWT are two completely different APIs, although the principles are the same. MIgrating your skill is easy. Migrating a program, however, would be a lot of work.

Answer 2

See this web sites:

1. SWT, AWT and Swing
2. Swing vs SWT
3. Swing vs SWT(2nd)

Very nice webpages with example source code:

1. SWT
2. SWT 2d-Graphics

Answer 3

I think you will experience some headache if application is to be run on different OS-es, dont know for now, but before there was no support for Mac OS, so forget about it if your app is to be run on Mac OS.

We also had this question in company and decided to go with Swing, because for normal desktop application you just cannot sense the speed difference which is supposedly on SWT side, and this speed you are buying with ruining WORA principle, you have to bring with your application needed .dlls or .so files to natively support your application running in desired OS-es.

For long time Swing part of Java (with printing) was weak point of Java. I think they will make much more out of Java if they succeeded to make Swing simple, intuitive and responsive at that time. Nowadays they made some positive steps in it, although still can be said, swing is big, complicated..

Answer 4

I think it's important to remember SWT came in to being when Swing was very immature and I guess the Eclipse folks thought it necessary to reinvent-the-wheel (suspect in retrospect that's something they regret, however thin a layer SWT is).

Nowadays Swing has matured, many of the problems and performance issues it used to have have been fixed and with the 3rd party extensions like JGoodies and JIDE I can't think of a good reason you would use anything but Swing for thick-client development.