What is the difference between Swing and AWT

Question

Can someone please explain me what s the difference between Swing and AWT   Are there any cases where AWT is more useful advised to use than swing or vice-versa

User · Answer

Swing vs AWT   Basically AWT came first and is a set of heavyweight UI components  meaning they are wrappers for operating system objects  whereas Swing built on top of AWT with a richer set of lightweight components   Any serious Java UI work is done in Swing not AWT  which was primarily used for applets

User · Answer

AWT is a Java interface to native system GUI code present in your OS  It will not work the same on every system  although it tries   Swing is a more-or-less pure-Java GUI  It uses AWT to create an operating system window and then paints pictures of buttons  labels  text  checkboxes  etc   into that window and responds to all of your mouse-clicks  key entries  etc   deciding for itself what to do instead of letting the operating system handle it  Thus Swing is 100  portable and is the same across platforms  although it is skinnable and has a  pluggable look and feel  that can make it look more or less like how the native windows and widgets would look    These are vastly different approaches to GUI toolkits and have a lot of consequences  A full answer to your question would try to explore all of those      Here are a couple   AWT is a cross-platform interface  so even though it uses the underlying OS or native GUI toolkit for its functionality  it doesn t provide access to everything that those toolkits can do  Advanced or newer AWT widgets that might exist on one platform might not be supported on another  Features of widgets that aren t the same on every platform might not be supported  or worse  they might work differently on each platform  People used to invest lots of effort to get their AWT applications to work consistently across platforms - for instance  they may try to make calls into native code from Java   Because AWT uses native GUI widgets  your OS knows about them and handles putting them in front of each other  etc   whereas Swing widgets are meaningless pixels within a window from your OS s point of view  Swing itself handles your widgets  layout and stacking   Mixing AWT and Swing is highly unsupported and can lead to ridiculous results  such as native buttons that obscure everything else in the dialog box in which they reside because everything else was created with Swing   Because Swing tries to do everything possible in Java other than the very raw graphics routines provided by a native GUI window  it used to incur quite a performance penalty compared to AWT  This made Swing unfortunately slow to catch on  However  this has shrunk dramatically over the last several years due to more optimized JVMs  faster machines  and  I presume  optimization of the Swing internals  Today a Swing application can run fast enough to be serviceable or even zippy  and almost indistinguishable from an application using native widgets  Some will say it took far too long to get to this point  but most will say that it is well worth it   Finally  you might also want to check out SWT  the GUI toolkit used for Eclipse  and an alternative to both AWT and Swing   which is somewhat of a return to the AWT idea of accessing native Widgets through Java

User · Answer

AWT is a Java interface to native system GUI code present in your OS  It will not work the same on every system  although it tries   Swing is a more-or-less pure-Java GUI  It uses AWT to create an operating system window and then paints pictures of buttons  labels  text  checkboxes  etc   into that window and responds to all of your mouse-clicks  key entries  etc   deciding for itself what to do instead of letting the operating system handle it  Thus Swing is 100  portable and is the same across platforms  although it is skinnable and has a  pluggable look and feel  that can make it look more or less like how the native windows and widgets would look    These are vastly different approaches to GUI toolkits and have a lot of consequences  A full answer to your question would try to explore all of those      Here are a couple   AWT is a cross-platform interface  so even though it uses the underlying OS or native GUI toolkit for its functionality  it doesn t provide access to everything that those toolkits can do  Advanced or newer AWT widgets that might exist on one platform might not be supported on another  Features of widgets that aren t the same on every platform might not be supported  or worse  they might work differently on each platform  People used to invest lots of effort to get their AWT applications to work consistently across platforms - for instance  they may try to make calls into native code from Java   Because AWT uses native GUI widgets  your OS knows about them and handles putting them in front of each other  etc   whereas Swing widgets are meaningless pixels within a window from your OS s point of view  Swing itself handles your widgets  layout and stacking   Mixing AWT and Swing is highly unsupported and can lead to ridiculous results  such as native buttons that obscure everything else in the dialog box in which they reside because everything else was created with Swing   Because Swing tries to do everything possible in Java other than the very raw graphics routines provided by a native GUI window  it used to incur quite a performance penalty compared to AWT  This made Swing unfortunately slow to catch on  However  this has shrunk dramatically over the last several years due to more optimized JVMs  faster machines  and  I presume  optimization of the Swing internals  Today a Swing application can run fast enough to be serviceable or even zippy  and almost indistinguishable from an application using native widgets  Some will say it took far too long to get to this point  but most will say that it is well worth it   Finally  you might also want to check out SWT  the GUI toolkit used for Eclipse  and an alternative to both AWT and Swing   which is somewhat of a return to the AWT idea of accessing native Widgets through Java

User · Answer

swing component provide much flexible user interface because it follow model view controller mvc   awt is not mvc based  swing works faster  awt does not work faster  swing components are light weight  awt components are heavy weight  swing occupies less memory space  awt occupies more memory space  swing component is platform independent  awt is platform dependent  swing require javax swing package  awt require javax awt package

User · Answer

As far as when AWT may be more useful than Swing -   you may be targeting an older JVM or platform that doesn t support Swing  This used to really come into play if you were building Applets - you wanted to target the lowest common denominator so people wouldn t have to install a newer Java plugin   I m not sure what the current most widely installed version of the Java plugin is - this may be different today  some people prefer the native look of AWT over Swing s  not quite there  platform skins   There are better 3rd party native looking skins than Swing s implementations BTW  Lots of people preferred using AWT s FileDialog over Swing s FileChooser because it gave the platform file dialog most people were used to rather than the  weird  custom Swing one

User · Answer

The base difference that which already everyone mentioned is that one is heavy weight and other is light weight  Let me explain  basically what the term heavy weight means is that when you re using the awt components the native code used for getting the view component is generated by the Operating System  thats why it the look and feel changes from OS to OS  Where as in swing components its the responsibility of JVM to generate the view for the components  Another statement which i saw is that swing is MVC based and awt is not

User · Answer

Swing vs AWT   Basically AWT came first and is a set of heavyweight UI components  meaning they are wrappers for operating system objects  whereas Swing built on top of AWT with a richer set of lightweight components   Any serious Java UI work is done in Swing not AWT  which was primarily used for applets

User · Answer

Several consequences result from this difference between AWT and Swing.

AWT is a thin layer of code on top of the OS, whereas Swing is much larger. Swing also has very much richer functionality. Using AWT, you have to implement a lot of things yourself, while Swing has them built in. For GUI-intensive work, AWT feels very primitive to work with compared to Swing. Because Swing implements GUI functionality itself rather than relying on the host OS, it can offer a richer environment on all platforms Java runs on. AWT is more limited in supplying the same functionality on all platforms because not all platforms implement the same-looking controls in the same ways.

Swing components are called "lightweight" because they do not require a native OS object to implement their functionality. JDialog and JFrame are heavyweight, because they do have a peer. So components like JButton, JTextArea, etc., are lightweight because they do not have an OS peer.

A peer is a widget provided by the operating system, such as a button object or an entry field object.

User · Answer

Swing    Swing is part of the java foundation classes  Swing components are platform-independent  Swing components are lightweight components because swing sits on the top of awt    AWT    AWT is called the abstract window tool  AWT components are platform-dependent  AWT components are heavyweight components

User · Answer

Several consequences result from this difference between AWT and Swing.

AWT is a thin layer of code on top of the OS, whereas Swing is much larger. Swing also has very much richer functionality. Using AWT, you have to implement a lot of things yourself, while Swing has them built in. For GUI-intensive work, AWT feels very primitive to work with compared to Swing. Because Swing implements GUI functionality itself rather than relying on the host OS, it can offer a richer environment on all platforms Java runs on. AWT is more limited in supplying the same functionality on all platforms because not all platforms implement the same-looking controls in the same ways.

Swing components are called "lightweight" because they do not require a native OS object to implement their functionality. JDialog and JFrame are heavyweight, because they do have a peer. So components like JButton, JTextArea, etc., are lightweight because they do not have an OS peer.

A peer is a widget provided by the operating system, such as a button object or an entry field object.

User · Answer

As far as when AWT may be more useful than Swing -   you may be targeting an older JVM or platform that doesn t support Swing  This used to really come into play if you were building Applets - you wanted to target the lowest common denominator so people wouldn t have to install a newer Java plugin   I m not sure what the current most widely installed version of the Java plugin is - this may be different today  some people prefer the native look of AWT over Swing s  not quite there  platform skins   There are better 3rd party native looking skins than Swing s implementations BTW  Lots of people preferred using AWT s FileDialog over Swing s FileChooser because it gave the platform file dialog most people were used to rather than the  weird  custom Swing one

User · Answer

The base difference that which already everyone mentioned is that one is heavy weight and other is light weight  Let me explain  basically what the term heavy weight means is that when you re using the awt components the native code used for getting the view component is generated by the Operating System  thats why it the look and feel changes from OS to OS  Where as in swing components its the responsibility of JVM to generate the view for the components  Another statement which i saw is that swing is MVC based and awt is not

User · Answer

Java 8 Swing  It is a part of Java Foundation Classes Swing is built on AWT Swing components are lightweight Swing supports pluggable look and feel Platform independent Uses MVC   Model-View-Controller architecture package   javax swing Unlike Swing   s other components  which are lightweight  the top-level containers are heavyweight   AWT - Abstract Window Toolkit  Platform dependent AWT components are heavyweight package java awt

User · Answer

AWT is a Java interface to native system GUI code present in your OS  It will not work the same on every system  although it tries   Swing is a more-or-less pure-Java GUI  It uses AWT to create an operating system window and then paints pictures of buttons  labels  text  checkboxes  etc   into that window and responds to all of your mouse-clicks  key entries  etc   deciding for itself what to do instead of letting the operating system handle it  Thus Swing is 100  portable and is the same across platforms  although it is skinnable and has a  pluggable look and feel  that can make it look more or less like how the native windows and widgets would look    These are vastly different approaches to GUI toolkits and have a lot of consequences  A full answer to your question would try to explore all of those      Here are a couple   AWT is a cross-platform interface  so even though it uses the underlying OS or native GUI toolkit for its functionality  it doesn t provide access to everything that those toolkits can do  Advanced or newer AWT widgets that might exist on one platform might not be supported on another  Features of widgets that aren t the same on every platform might not be supported  or worse  they might work differently on each platform  People used to invest lots of effort to get their AWT applications to work consistently across platforms - for instance  they may try to make calls into native code from Java   Because AWT uses native GUI widgets  your OS knows about them and handles putting them in front of each other  etc   whereas Swing widgets are meaningless pixels within a window from your OS s point of view  Swing itself handles your widgets  layout and stacking   Mixing AWT and Swing is highly unsupported and can lead to ridiculous results  such as native buttons that obscure everything else in the dialog box in which they reside because everything else was created with Swing   Because Swing tries to do everything possible in Java other than the very raw graphics routines provided by a native GUI window  it used to incur quite a performance penalty compared to AWT  This made Swing unfortunately slow to catch on  However  this has shrunk dramatically over the last several years due to more optimized JVMs  faster machines  and  I presume  optimization of the Swing internals  Today a Swing application can run fast enough to be serviceable or even zippy  and almost indistinguishable from an application using native widgets  Some will say it took far too long to get to this point  but most will say that it is well worth it   Finally  you might also want to check out SWT  the GUI toolkit used for Eclipse  and an alternative to both AWT and Swing   which is somewhat of a return to the AWT idea of accessing native Widgets through Java

User · Answer

The base difference that which already everyone mentioned is that one is heavy weight and other is light weight  Let me explain  basically what the term heavy weight means is that when you re using the awt components the native code used for getting the view component is generated by the Operating System  thats why it the look and feel changes from OS to OS  Where as in swing components its the responsibility of JVM to generate the view for the components  Another statement which i saw is that swing is MVC based and awt is not

User · Answer

AWT 1   AWT occupies more memory space 2   AWT is platform dependent 3   AWT require javax awt package  swings 1   Swing occupies less memory space 2   Swing component is platform independent 3   Swing requires javax swing package

User · Answer

Swing vs AWT   Basically AWT came first and is a set of heavyweight UI components  meaning they are wrappers for operating system objects  whereas Swing built on top of AWT with a richer set of lightweight components   Any serious Java UI work is done in Swing not AWT  which was primarily used for applets

User · Answer

Swing vs AWT   Basically AWT came first and is a set of heavyweight UI components  meaning they are wrappers for operating system objects  whereas Swing built on top of AWT with a richer set of lightweight components   Any serious Java UI work is done in Swing not AWT  which was primarily used for applets

User · Answer

AWT is a Java interface to native system GUI code present in your OS  It will not work the same on every system  although it tries   Swing is a more-or-less pure-Java GUI  It uses AWT to create an operating system window and then paints pictures of buttons  labels  text  checkboxes  etc   into that window and responds to all of your mouse-clicks  key entries  etc   deciding for itself what to do instead of letting the operating system handle it  Thus Swing is 100  portable and is the same across platforms  although it is skinnable and has a  pluggable look and feel  that can make it look more or less like how the native windows and widgets would look    These are vastly different approaches to GUI toolkits and have a lot of consequences  A full answer to your question would try to explore all of those      Here are a couple   AWT is a cross-platform interface  so even though it uses the underlying OS or native GUI toolkit for its functionality  it doesn t provide access to everything that those toolkits can do  Advanced or newer AWT widgets that might exist on one platform might not be supported on another  Features of widgets that aren t the same on every platform might not be supported  or worse  they might work differently on each platform  People used to invest lots of effort to get their AWT applications to work consistently across platforms - for instance  they may try to make calls into native code from Java   Because AWT uses native GUI widgets  your OS knows about them and handles putting them in front of each other  etc   whereas Swing widgets are meaningless pixels within a window from your OS s point of view  Swing itself handles your widgets  layout and stacking   Mixing AWT and Swing is highly unsupported and can lead to ridiculous results  such as native buttons that obscure everything else in the dialog box in which they reside because everything else was created with Swing   Because Swing tries to do everything possible in Java other than the very raw graphics routines provided by a native GUI window  it used to incur quite a performance penalty compared to AWT  This made Swing unfortunately slow to catch on  However  this has shrunk dramatically over the last several years due to more optimized JVMs  faster machines  and  I presume  optimization of the Swing internals  Today a Swing application can run fast enough to be serviceable or even zippy  and almost indistinguishable from an application using native widgets  Some will say it took far too long to get to this point  but most will say that it is well worth it   Finally  you might also want to check out SWT  the GUI toolkit used for Eclipse  and an alternative to both AWT and Swing   which is somewhat of a return to the AWT idea of accessing native Widgets through Java

User · Answer

The base difference that which already everyone mentioned is that one is heavy weight and other is light weight  Let me explain  basically what the term heavy weight means is that when you re using the awt components the native code used for getting the view component is generated by the Operating System  thats why it the look and feel changes from OS to OS  Where as in swing components its the responsibility of JVM to generate the view for the components  Another statement which i saw is that swing is MVC based and awt is not

User · Answer

swing component provide much flexible user interface because it follow model view controller mvc   awt is not mvc based  swing works faster  awt does not work faster  swing components are light weight  awt components are heavy weight  swing occupies less memory space  awt occupies more memory space  swing component is platform independent  awt is platform dependent  swing require javax swing package  awt require javax awt package

User · Answer

AWT 1   AWT occupies more memory space 2   AWT is platform dependent 3   AWT require javax awt package  swings 1   Swing occupies less memory space 2   Swing component is platform independent 3   Swing requires javax swing package

User · Answer

Swing    Swing is part of the java foundation classes  Swing components are platform-independent  Swing components are lightweight components because swing sits on the top of awt    AWT    AWT is called the abstract window tool  AWT components are platform-dependent  AWT components are heavyweight components

User · Answer

Java 8 Swing  It is a part of Java Foundation Classes Swing is built on AWT Swing components are lightweight Swing supports pluggable look and feel Platform independent Uses MVC   Model-View-Controller architecture package   javax swing Unlike Swing   s other components  which are lightweight  the top-level containers are heavyweight   AWT - Abstract Window Toolkit  Platform dependent AWT components are heavyweight package java awt

[java] What is the difference between Swing and AWT?

The answer is

Swing

AWT - Abstract Window Toolkit

Swing

AWT - Abstract Window Toolkit

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