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Migrate your Swing application to SWT

Yannick Saillet (ysaillet@de.ibm.com), Software Engineer, IBM

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.

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Date: 19 Jan 2004
Level: Introductory
PDF: A4 and Letter (770 KB | 103 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

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Resources

Learn

Consult the Eclipse and SWT API at Eclipse.org.
Consult the Swing API in the API documentation of the J2SE platform.
Visit Eclipse.org for downloads, documentation, mail archives, and articles.
For Eclipse project development plans, a FAQ, and a list of handy SWT code snippets, check out the component development resources.
See collection of code snippets for the code illustrating the use of TreeEditor.
Read more about the GEF project.
In "SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Part 1 " ( Eclipse Corner, March 2001), Steve Northover gives an introduction to the design strategies used in SWT.
In "Plug a Swing-based development tool into Eclipse " (developerWorks, October 2002), Terry Chan describes how to integrate a Swing application into the Eclipse platform.
Read "Understanding Layouts in SWT " by Carolyn MacLeod and Shantha Ramachandran (Eclipse Corner, May 2002) to get an introduction to SWT's layouts.
In their articles "Getting your feet wet with the SWT StyledText widget " and "Into the deep end of the SWT StyledText widget " (Eclipse Corner, September 2002), Lynne Kues and Knut Radloff explain how to use the StyledText widget to display and edit formatted text in SWT.
In "SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Part 2," (Eclipse Corner, November 2001), Steve Northover and Carolyn MacLeod provide a list of rules to follow to manage graphical resources when programming in SWT.
"SWT color model," James Moody and Carolyn MacLeod (Eclipse Corner, April 2001) gives some tip about the management of color resources in SWT.
In his article "Using the Eclipse GUI outside the Eclipse Workbench" (developerWorks, January 2003), Adrian Van Emmenis demonstrates the use of JFace viewers, content providers, and label providers with SWT tables and trees.
In his article "Building and delivering a table editor with SWT/JFace " (Eclipse Corner, July 2003), Laurent Gauthier explains how to build an editable and sortable table, using the TableViewer API of JFace.
In "How to use the JFace Tree Viewer " (Eclipse Corner, May 2002), Chris Grindstaff explains how to use the JFace TreeViewer API.
Get the latest news on the Websphere Studio tools at the WebSphere Studio Zone.
See the Java technology zone tutorials page for a complete listing of free Java-related tutorials from developerWorks.
Stay on top of the Eclipse platform at the developerWorks Open source projects zone.
Find hundreds of articles about every aspect of Java programming in the developerWorks Java technology zone.

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