Eclipse is an open source universal tool platform, dedicated to providing a robust, full-featured industry platform for the development of highly integrated tools. With millions of downloads, Eclipse becomes more and more popular. One of the most important common facilities provided by the Eclipse framework is the portable native widget user interface called the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), which provides a set of OS-independent APIs for widgets and graphics. SWT is analogous to AWT and Swing except SWT uses a rich set of native widgets. Built on SWT, JFace is a user interface toolkit handling many common UI programming tasks. JFace is designed to work with SWT without hiding it. Some of the advantages SWT/JFace offers over Swing include support for native features, fast execution speed, and flexible programming models.

This book teaches you how to build practical user interfaces with SWT/JFace. After introducing each widget, I present a great deal of Java source code to show you how to use the widget effectively. You can use the sample code as the basis to develop real-world applications quickly. Additionally, many techniques and tips are presented to help you save time. Finally, the last chapter shows you how to build an FTP client by combining everything covered in the book.

The comprehensive coverage of the SWT/JFace framework also makes this book an ideal reference

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