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SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Volume 1
- By Steve Northover, Mike Wilson
- Published Jun 28, 2004 by Addison-Wesley Professional. Part of the Eclipse Series series.
- Copyright 2004
- Dimensions: 7x9-1/4
- Pages: 592
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-321-25663-8
- ISBN-13: 978-0-321-25663-8
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Product Author Bios
The principal architect of the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), Steve Northover joined IBM OTI Labs in 1990. He is an expert on performance, programming for operating systems, and native user interface toolkits. He is the lead of the Eclipse SWT team and is one of the few people who understands the implementation of the toolkit on every platform.
Mike Wilson has been a part of IBM OTI Labs since its inception in 1987 as Object Technology International, Inc. Over the years he has played a major part in many of the company's most significant successes, including contributing to the design, implementation, and maintenance of SWT. Currently, he is active in many aspects of the Eclipse Platform, including the Core and Team teams.
The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a new class library for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in Java. Created as part of the Eclipse project, SWT allows developers to build efficient, portable applications that directly access the user-interface facilities of the operating systems it is implemented on. This revolutionary technology makes it possible to create Java-based applications that are indistinguishable from a platform's native applications.
SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Volume 1, will show you how to:
- Get SWT, install it, and invoke it from your programs.
- Understand widgets--the building blocks of GUI--and how they interact with users and compose a GUI.
- Use graphics routines to configure the appearance of native widgets and draw application-specific graphics.
- Apply best practices from real-world uses of SWT.
- Appreciate what makes a quality SWT program.
In this book--the first definitive guide to SWT--two of the technology's lead designers and implementers show you how to break the task of building a GUI-based application into components. They then show how these components are modeled in SWT and provide a series of graded examples. The result is a guided tour of the essential aspects of this exciting toolkit, ranging from mouse and keyboard handling to user-interface controls for native operating systems.
If you want to build modern GUI-based application, SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Volume 1, will prove an invaluable guide and reference.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Best book for the details -- and you'll need them!, By
This review is from: SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Volume 1 (Paperback)
First, a caveat -- this book only covers SWT, the Standard Widget Toolkit, and not JFace. Presumably, JFace will be covered in a forthcoming book. That said, using JFace well requires a good knowledge of SWT, so it would be a mistake to avoid this book just because it doesn't include JFace topics.This book was written by Steve Northover, one of the architects of SWT, and Northover's profound knowledge of SWT is evident on every page. He communicates clearly and efficiently the details that you need to know in order to be a good SWT programmer. Understanding event-driven programming is skill of a different order than "regular" programming. Operations aren't as neatly sequenced in the former and, as a result, both programming and debugging can be more difficult, especially for one not used to the programming style. Northover spends a lot of time covering the internals of SWT and making sure that things like the Display and Controls are clearly explained, rather than simply... Read more
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
The Definitive Guide to SWT, By Lee Roberts (Cary, NC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Volume 1 (Paperback)
This is one of two books that I purchased at Java One a few weeks ago (I also have the Gamma/Beck book which is also part of the same series). It is written by the chief architects of SWT itself and provides some wonderful insight into the internals of SWT. The examples are well chosen and easy to follow and lots of tips are provided for dealing various arcane SWT issues.The book intro includes a section on the history of SWT which I found to be fascinating given all of the Swing vs. SWT discussions in the press over the last couple of years. Every widget and layout manager is discussed in considerable detail and there is a nice discussion on creating custom widgets and using custom graphics. Ultimately, this is a great reference that you will want to keep close by, if you are planning to build any SWT apps, Eclipse plugins or Eclipse RCP apps. I very much look forward to reading Volume 2!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
SWT Fundamentals, By
This review is from: SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Volume 1 (Paperback)
If you want to learn the SWT fundamentals, read this book. Remember that JFace, Eclipse IDE, Eclipse Rich Client Platform applications all use SWT at the bottom. While the book does not cover some advanced topics like custom widgets and layouts, it will build a solid foundation for understanding these advanced topics.
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Online Sample Chapter
Table of Contents
Foreword by Erich Gamma.
Preface.
Introduction.
I. WIDGETS.
II. GRAPHICS.
III. APPLICATIONS.
IV. NEXT TIME.
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