Chapter 4. The Standard Widget Toolkit

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a thin layer on top of the platform's native controls. SWT provides the foundation for the entire Eclipse user interface (UI). This chapter begins with some history and philosophy of SWT, and then dives into using SWT to build applications. It covers most of the widgets commonly encountered and the layout managers used to arrange them within a window. The chapter concludes with a discussion of various resource management issues to be considered when using SWT.