swt tutorials or guides

Question

Hi,

I have some years experience with swing and feel comfortable that I understand the architecture.

Now I need to get up to speed on SWT rather quickly.

What would you recommend I study from online sources or books so I can get my head around the SWT architecture quickly ? I'm really starting from scratch.

Answer 1

SWT Snippets. That's pretty much all you need to get started. There are some papers on SWT at eclipse.org as well. A lot is pretty similar to Swing so you will be up to speed in no time.

Answer 2

I notice that the Eclipse Visual Editor is being worked on again. This is a useful learning tool, even if you don't want to use it to develop your GUIs because of the way it translates WYSIWYG -> code and code -> WYSIWYG (within certain limitations, of course - it isn't magic). Useful for seeing the relationship between the code and the results.

Answer 3

Have you ever tried swtxml plugin for eclipse? I find it (even with its faults) a small sweet tool. Lets you design your Composites and so on using xml.

Answer 4

The pdf's from this site are very good: www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~eclipse

Also there are some snippets on www.java2s.com (similar to those from the eclipse site)

If you used swing and now you want to start with SWT, this book shows you the differences: SWT Eye for the Swing Guy

Answer 5

Don't forget to use utils like GridLayoutFactory and GridDataFactory from JFace. They really reduce swt interface developement time.