Standard Widget Toolkit

A demo application on Windows 10
Original author(s)	Stephen Northover
Developer(s)	Eclipse Foundation
Initial release	April 2003; 21 years ago (2003-04)
Stable release	4.29 / September 3, 2023; 14 months ago (2023-09-03)
Repository	github.com/eclipse-platform/eclipse.platform.swt
Written in	Java
Operating system	Cross-platform
Platform	Java platform
Available in	Multilingual
Type	Widget toolkit for Java platform
License	Eclipse Public
Website	www.eclipse.org/swt

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a graphical widget toolkit for use with the Java platform. It was originally developed by Stephen Northover at IBM and is now maintained by the Eclipse Foundation in tandem with the Eclipse IDE. It is an alternative to the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) and Swing Java graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits provided by Sun Microsystems as part of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE).

To display GUI elements, the SWT implementation accesses the native GUI libraries of the operating system using Java Native Interface (JNI) in a manner that is similar to those programs written using operating system-specific application programming interfaces (APIs). Programs that call SWT are portable, but the implementation of the toolkit, despite part of it being written in Java, is unique for each platform.

The toolkit is free and open-source software distributed under the Eclipse Public License, which is approved by the Open Source Initiative.^[1]