SWT Documentation

This page contains links to books, tutorials, and articles about SWT.

SWT is in print in the following books.

• "SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Volume 1" by Steve Northover and Mike Wilson
• "The Definitive Guide to SWT and JFace" by Rob Warner and Robert Harris
• "The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse, Second Edition" by Jim D'Anjou, Scott Fairbrother, Dan Kehn, John Kellerman, and Pat McCarthy (Chapter 14)
• "Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plugins" by Erich Gamma and Kent Beck (Chapter 34)
• "Eclipse in Action: A Guide for the Java Developer" by David Gallardo, Ed Burnette, and Robert McGovern (Appendix D)

The Eclipse Help system contains good solid documentation for SWT in the Platform Plug-in Developer Guide. To get there in Eclipse, select
Help > Help Contents > Platform Plug-in Developer Guide.

You can also get this document in PDF format.

SWT documentation appears in the following sections of the Platform Plug-in Developer Guide:

• Programmer's Guide: Standard Widget Toolkit
• Reference: API Reference: org.eclipse.swt
• Examples Guide: Standard Widget Toolkit

There are all sorts of articles here:

• Articles about SWT on Eclipse Corner at eclipse.org
• How to develop SWT applications in Eclipse
• How to run the ControlExample and other SWT examples
• How to deploy SWT applications on Mac OS X
• How to deploy SWT applications using Java Web Start
• How to use SWT from CVS
• How to generate the SWT JNI Code
• Using OpenGL with SWT 3.2

External articles, interviews in online journals:

• SWT articles published in JDJ and OS News:
  • Ship Happens! Insights From the Eclipse SWT Community
  • SWT: A Native Widget Toolkit for Java, Part 1 of 2
  • SWT: A Native Widget Toolkit for Java, Part 2 of 2
  • Desktop Java with SWT: an interview with Steve Northover

• SWT articles on IBM Developerworks Library:
  • Using the Eclipse GUI outside the Eclipse Workbench
  • Integrate ActiveX controls into SWT applications
  • Equipping SWT applications with content assistants
  • A Gentle Introduction to SWT and JFace (4 parts)
  • Create an Eclipse Game Plug-in (4 parts)

In addition to reading the Javadoc inside Eclipse, you can read it online here:

• Online Javadoc

There have been a few tutorials posted about SWT that you may find useful:

• Getting Started with Eclipse and SWT

This site contains some tutorials and example programs that will help programmers who are new to Eclipse and the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) install Eclipse correctly and run some simple Java/SWT programs.

• Compiling Eclipse Applications for Windows With GCJ/MinGW

A guide for compiling an SWT application into an executable.

• An introduction to SWT

Adapted from "SWT and JFace", a No Fluff Just Stuff 2004 presentation.