This is the 3rd post in the The state of JVM desktop frameworks focus series. This series is dedicated to the state of JVM desktop frameworks. After having had a look at Swing the previous week, this post focuses on the Standard Widget Toolkit. SWT originates from the Eclipse project, an IDE. For Eclipse, the developers built a dedicated framework to build their graphic components upon. Swing implements the drawing of widgets in Java from scratch.

This is the 1st post in the The state of JVM desktop frameworks focus series. I’m interested in GUI applications since I’ve starting coding. Building a back-end app that manages teraflops of operations is an impressive engineering feat. But the feedback cycle when developing a desktop app is much shorter. That makes it, at least for me, much more motivating. This is even truer for side-projects.