Covering Eclipse's new capability for building graphical user interfaces with version 3.0, the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) and JFace, this guide demonstrates how these award-winning tools have received broad support for creating desktop applications. Theory and practical examples reveal how to build GUIs that combine the look and feel of native interfaces with the platform independence of Java. This guide also shows how SWT makes use of the widgets provided by the operating system and describes how these components can be associated with events, containers, and graphics. With this knowledge, programmers can build fully featured user interfaces that communicate directly with the underlying platform. JFace's ability to simplify and organize the process of GUI design is then demonstrated, enabling developers to modify and adapt components, and separate their information from their appearance.

We developed this book with one primary goal in mind: to introduce the SWT and JFace toolsets as simply and as thoroughly as possible. Although the available documentation covers many aspects of the two libraries, we were disappointed by the amount (particularly in graphics) that has gone undocumented. So, we came together in late 2003 to create an approachable book that covers both the high-level theory and the low-level details of the combined SWT/JFace development tools. Thanks to the hard work of the folks at eclipse.org, SWT and JFace have recently received quite a bit of attention and debate within the Java community.

Most of this discussion has focused on the relative merits of Swing as a standard component of the Java 2 platform, versus SWT as a nonstandard library that uses native code—an approach foreign to the “write once run anywhere” mantra embraced by most Java developers. Although Swing has many strengths, we believe that SWT and JFace together provide a compelling alternative for developing the user interface of many types of applications.