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Curious - why would anyone choose SWT over Swing/JavaFX?

It used to be that Swing/AWT really sucked. The default theme on every platform (Metal) was really ugly. Everything was purple. The "native" look and feel was emulated (poorly). It was also very slow. That's the reasons why SWT was started in the first place. Swing would just not cut it for any app that wanted a nice UI.

Nowadays the situation is completely different. Swing looks and performs great compared to SWT. IMO it would make much more sense to just use Swing.

JavaFX never happened. People just went web instead. No one uses it and it's officially deprecated.

JavaFX was split out from the JRE and is now its own package[1]. It very much "happened" and there are plenty[2] of people using it.

If you are looking to build a fully themed app similar to a web app Swing or JavaFX are definitely the way to go. Swing still uses an emulated native look and feel and it is pretty decent. If you are planning on building something with real platform UI I would still go with SWT, especially if accessibility is on the table.

[1]https://openjfx.io [2]https://github.com/search?q=javafx&ref=simplesearch

JavaFX may be the most feature complete cross platform GUI framework after Qt. I have recently used it for a project and it tuned out much better than if I had used Swing.

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