Created by IBM for Eclipse, they seemed to think that Swing was not suited for Eclipse at the time. By itself is pretty low-level, and it uses the platform's native widgets through JNI. It is not related to Swing and AWT at all. Their API is however somewhat clunky and not intuitive. They do have some advanced component's like a TreeTable. (but i don't think they support sorting and filtering out of the box). SWT uses some native bindings (through JNI?) and the rant on the internet is that this framework should not be used in today's projects. (why not?)