Editing Standard Widget Toolkit (section)

== History ==
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The first Java GUI toolkit was the [[Abstract Window Toolkit]] (AWT), introduced with [[Java Development Kit]] (JDK) 1.0 as one component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The original AWT was a simple Java [[wrapper library]] around native ([[operating system]]-supplied) [[widget (computing)|widgets]] such as menus, windows, and buttons.

[[Swing (Java)|Swing]] was the next generation GUI toolkit introduced by Sun in [[Java Platform, Standard Edition]] (J2SE) 1.2. Swing was developed to provide a richer set of GUI [[software component]]s than AWT. Swing GUI elements are all-Java with no native code: instead of wrapping native GUI components, Swing draws its own components by using [[Java 2D]] to call low-level operating system drawing routines.

The roots of SWT go back to work that [[Object Technology International]] (OTI), did in the 1990s when creating multiplatform, portable, native widget interfaces for [[Smalltalk]], originally for OTI Smalltalk, which became IBM Smalltalk in 1993. IBM Smalltalk's Common Widget layer provided fast, native access to multiple platform widget sets while still providing a common API without suffering the ''lowest common denominator'' problem typical of other portable graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits. [[IBM]] was developing [[VisualAge]], an [[integrated development environment]] (IDE) written in Smalltalk. They decided to open-source the project, which led to the development of [[Eclipse (software)|Eclipse]], intended to compete against other IDEs such as [[Microsoft Visual Studio]]. Eclipse is written in Java, and IBM developers, deciding that they needed a toolkit that had "native [[look and feel]]" and "native [[Computer_performance|performance]]", created SWT as a Swing replacement.<ref>{{cite web |title= FAQ: Why does Eclipse use SWT? |url= http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_Why_does_Eclipse_use_SWT%3F |access-date= 2007-03-24}}</ref>