Ozgur Akan's Blog: Why I choose SWT against Swing: "I am just evaluating a transition from Swing to SWT for a massive Swing application, and so far the result are promising. We will continue this road, cause the user and customer feedback clearly shows, that they want it. SWT may be faster, but the point is, that is not so memory consuming and simply feels better. Perfomance in a measurable way is not the point neither with Swing or SWT. But the felt performance or responsiveness is an issue. At least for us, as we are writing a rich client application using a lot of Swing, Java2D, and so on at the moment. And in this area SWT 'our performs' Swing easily. In the typical area of database driven form based application this might not be the case. A view comments above someone stated, that Eclipse is not as fast as Idea. Well, from my point of view this is not true. I compared Eclipse 3 and Idea 4 for a two weeks. Eclipse is faster, but IDEA has the richer feature set at the moment for web development. Well, and I also have to admit, that the regular argument 'The people don't know how to develop using Swing.' makes me sad. All my developers have a large experience using Swing, the consultants we hired too, but none of them was able to make the application more responsive. The sun architects even wondered how fast we got this baby. WYSIWYG typographically correct editors are something, that is not often seen in the Java world. We will move to SWT. It is 'smaller', 'faster', feels better and in my eyes in combination with JFace easier to use then Swing. Swing is well designed, but as a lot of stuff done by Sun - over generalized."