The Eclipse SWT (Standard Windowing Toolkit) is a framework for building and rendering GUIs packaged with the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment and upon which the Eclipse IDE itself is based. (For more information about Eclipse and the SWT framework, refer to http://www.eclipse.org.
An SWT GUI is made up of instances of the org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget class. The constructors of all instances of this class (and of the subclasses of this class) take two parameters, the parent Widget instance (almost always a subclass of org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Composite) and an integer that specifies "style bits" that dictate various characteristics (e.g., borders, text alignment) of the type of Widget being instantiated. Because a parent Widget must always be passed to a constructor, the parent must be instantiated prior to its child components in an SWT GUI. Also, note that the instantiation and linking of child to parent is an atomic operation in SWT.
The method isVisible()
invokes isVisible()
on the SWT UI thread
for either the parent or the parent shell depending on the type of control.
The method requestFocusFor(Object)
invokes setFocus()
on the
SWT UI thread for the appropriate controls depending on the control's class type.
The method invokeOnUIThread(Runnable)
calls
syncExec(Runnable)
on the Display while the method
asyncInvokeOnUIThread(Runnable)
calls
asyncExec(Runnable)
on the Display.
Other features of the SWT architecture are not discussed here. See the ACTF Validation API for more information about this architecture implementation.