The JavaUI group works primarily with two user interface technologies: Swing and SWT. Both toolkits have their strengths and weaknesses. We can help you pick the right tool for the job.

Swing is the official UI framework included in Java's standard library. Rather than mapping to native widgets, Swing does all its own rendering which adds a great deal of flexibility. Swing supports pluggable look and feels and numerous components which are not found in the native toolkits of some platforms. Swing used to suffer from crippling performance problems, but as of Java 5, Swing's performance has been enormously improved. On most modern computers and in most situations, the performance delta between a well written Swing application and a native application is not noticeable.

SWT was introduced by the wildly popular Eclipse project initiated by IBM. Like AWT, Eclipse maps to native widgets. Fortunately, SWTs implementation of this technique is much higher quality than the original AWT implementation, which was often lovingly referred to as the "Awful Windowing Toolkit". SWT is in some ways less flexible than Swing, but it provides excellent performance (even on older machines), tighter desktop integration, and a native browser widget. If you are planning to build an Eclipse plugin, its best to use SWT (although there is limited support for Swing.) SWT/JFace also makes sense for standalone desktop applications and rich clients in some cases.