Swing v/s AWT

A Kumar

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Posts: 982

posted 18 years ago

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Hi,

What is meant by Swing being lightweight and AWT as heavy..

Regards

Stephen Foy

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posted 18 years ago

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"Swing components are often described as lightweight because they do not require allocation of native resources in the operating system's windowing toolkit. The AWT components are referred to as heavyweight components." - Wikipedia

Stephen Foy - Microsoft Application Development Consultant

Stan James

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Posts: 8791

posted 18 years ago

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Heavyweight components create UI components in the native UI. So an AWT button is a Windows button. Lightweight components draw UI components. So a Swing button is a picture of a button. Now, where can Swing draw a component? On a heavy one. But Swing can draw a bunch of lightweight components on one heavyweight canvas so it has far fewer heavyweight components at runtime.

The original theory was that the AWT approach would be faster as drawing is done by API calls to the OS. But it led to OS dependencies and the "weight" problem. So Swing was added as an alternative.

UI experts check me ... is that right so far?

A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of the idea. John Ciardi

Ernest Friedman-Hill

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Posts: 24207

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posted 18 years ago

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Stan speaks the truth.

I'm going to move this to the Swing/AWT forum.

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