Nothing ventured, nothing gained

Getting started with a new framework is not an easy task, especially if it’s a UI toolkit such as Eclipse’s SWT. One way, I’ve found, that works with me is to peruse snippets of code that get straight to the point. The org.eclipse.swt.snippets project in the Eclipse CVS repository does just that. The project, which can be checked out via Eclipse, is an excellent illustration of techniques and UI widgets available to an SWT developer. I highly suggest you check out the project and run each snippet. Ok, maybe not each snippet, but you should definitely spend some time browsing them.

For instance, Snippet231 illustrates an SWT Table with multi-line columns. Before Eclipse 3.2, a third party SWT library had to be used to emulate that functionality.

To check out the Snippets project from Eclipse

1. File > New > Project

2. CVS > Projects from CVS

3. Create a new respository location with the following information

   $CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@dev.eclipse.org:/home/eclipse

4. Or just enter the following details

Viola, you should be playing around with SWT snippets in no time. Visit SWT Snippets for more information.