Chapter 2. Creating Views with SWT

SWT – the Standard Widget Toolkit

SWT is the widget toolkit used by Eclipse that gives performant access to the platform's native tools in a portable manner. Unlike Swing, which is rendered with Java native drawing operations, SWT delegates the drawing to the underlying operating system.

In this chapter we will:

• Create an Eclipse view with SWT widgets
• Create a custom SWT widget
• Work with SWT resources and learn how to detect and fix resource leaks
• Handle focus operations
• Group components and resize them automatically
• Create system tray items
• Display nonrectangular windows
• Provide scrolling and tabbed navigation