Eclipse SWT: Standar Widget Toolkit

SWT is awesome. Many people still associate Java with ugly graphical user interfaces. It is really unfair and makes me sad, I suffer a lot every time I heard comments about Java GUIs. I'm a very sensible person? may be. SWT is a toolkit to build Java GUIs. Most Java applications you know are proably using SUN's Swing. Swing is the official GUI toolkit, it provides the buttons, the text, the input boxes, all the widgets that you see in any GUI.The look and feel of Swing applications is pluggable, allowing a choice of look and feel. For example, the same program can use either the Java or the Windows look and feel. SWT is an open source widget toolkit for Java designed to provide efficient, portable access to the user-interface facilities of the operating systems on which it is implemented. SWT is a really think layer over the operating system, a lightweight library that wraps the operating system specific UI objects into standard easy to use well-designed Java classes. I will talk a lot about SWT in this blog so take it as the first introduction.

Azureus/Vuze

Azureus, Probably, the first application using Eclipse technology I have used. And one of the most popular ones. Is a Bittorrent open source client. Full of great features, for advanced P2P users that need to know every detail about the transfers, peers, performance, network status. Many plug-ins are available making it more interesting and powerful than other p2p clients. I thought it was based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, but it doesn't seem to be the case, looking at the source the plug-in system is not OSGi. It seems they only use SWT but not the RCP framework