Migrate your Swing application to SWT

Yannick Saillet is a software engineer at the IBM Laboratory of Boeblingen in Germany. Yannick joined IBM Germany as software developer in 1998. He first worked for IBM Learning Services as a software engineer in several distributed learning projects. He joined the IBM Boeblingen Laboratory in 2000 and since that date has been active in the development of the DB2 Intelligent Miner products. He received his master degree from the Ecole Superieure des Sciences et Technologies de l'Ingenieur de Nancy (ESSTIN) at the University of Nancy in France.

Summary:  One of the reasons for the success of the Eclipse platform is the performance of its user interface compared to other Java applications. The SWT is a key contributor to that success. SWT allows you to build cross-platform user interfaces that are as rich as Swing UIs and that perform as well as native UIs, but the toolkit has a drawback: SWT is not compatible with AWT and Swing. Mixing SWT and AWT panels in the same application can have disastrous effects. Thus, if you want to deliver an existing Swing tool as an Eclipse plugin, you need to rewrite its UI with SWT. A lofty task for complex UIs. Java developer and Eclipse enthusiast Yannick Saillet offers this comprehensive, hands-on guide to porting a Swing application to SWT using extensive code samples to illustrate the techniques. This tutorial is very comprehensive and will require significant time to complete. However, it serves as excellent reference material. We recommend you download the PDF for offline viewing.