What is the difference between Swing and AWT?

Question

AWT is a Java interface to native system GUI code present in your OS. It will not work the same on every system, although it tries.

Swing is a more-or-less pure-Java GUI. It uses AWT to create an operating system window and then paints pictures of buttons, labels, text, checkboxes, etc., into that window and responds to all of your mouse-clicks, key entries, etc., deciding for itself what to do instead of letting the operating system handle it. Thus Swing is 100% portable and is the same across platforms (although it is skinnable and has a "pluggable look and feel" that can make it look more or less like how the native windows and widgets would look).

These are vastly different approaches to GUI toolkits and have a lot of consequences. A full answer to your question would try to explore all of those. :) Here are a couple:

AWT is a cross-platform interface, so even though it uses the underlying OS or native GUI toolkit for its functionality, it doesn't provide access to everything that those toolkits can do. Advanced or newer AWT widgets that might exist on one platform might not be supported on another. Features of widgets that aren't the same on every platform might not be supported, or worse, they might work differently on each platform. People used to invest lots of effort to get their AWT applications to work consistently across platforms - for instance, they may try to make calls into native code from Java.

Because AWT uses native GUI widgets, your OS knows about them and handles putting them in front of each other, etc., whereas Swing widgets are meaningless pixels within a window from your OS's point of view. Swing itself handles your widgets' layout and stacking. Mixing AWT and Swing is highly unsupported and can lead to ridiculous results, such as native buttons that obscure everything else in the dialog box in which they reside because everything else was created with Swing.

Because Swing tries to do everything possible in Java other than the very raw graphics routines provided by a native GUI window, it used to incur quite a performance penalty compared to AWT. This made Swing unfortunately slow to catch on. However, this has shrunk dramatically over the last several years due to more optimized JVMs, faster machines, and (I presume) optimization of the Swing internals. Today a Swing application can run fast enough to be serviceable or even zippy, and almost indistinguishable from an application using native widgets. Some will say it took far too long to get to this point, but most will say that it is well worth it.

Finally, you might also want to check out SWT (the GUI toolkit used for Eclipse, and an alternative to both AWT and Swing), which is somewhat of a return to the AWT idea of accessing native Widgets through Java.

The base difference that which already everyone mentioned is that one is heavy weight and other is light weight. Let me explain, basically what the term heavy weight means is that when you're using the awt components the native code used for getting the view component is generated by the Operating System, thats why it the look and feel changes from OS to OS. Where as in swing components its the responsibility of JVM to generate the view for the components. Another statement which i saw is that swing is MVC based and awt is not.

Swing vs AWT. Basically AWT came first and is a set of heavyweight UI components (meaning they are wrappers for operating system objects) whereas Swing built on top of AWT with a richer set of lightweight components.

Any serious Java UI work is done in Swing not AWT, which was primarily used for applets.

As far as when AWT may be more useful than Swing -

• you may be targeting an older JVM or platform that doesn't support Swing. This used to really come into play if you were building Applets - you wanted to target the lowest common denominator so people wouldn't have to install a newer Java plugin. I'm not sure what the current most widely installed version of the Java plugin is - this may be different today.
• some people prefer the native look of AWT over Swing's 'not quite there' platform skins. (There are better 3rd party native looking skins than Swing's implementations BTW) Lots of people preferred using AWT's FileDialog over Swing's FileChooser because it gave the platform file dialog most people were used to rather than the 'weird' custom Swing one.