java - Swing versus SWT

Question

What criteria should I use to choose between SWT and Swing? I assume they both provide satisfactory GUI performance and platform availability.

My personal criteria currently include:

• layouts/layout managers;
• data binding;
• pre-built controls;
• ease of development.

Answer 1

My criteria to choose between SWT and Swing:

1. quality and availibility of documentation (docs, books, tutorials, snippets)
2. number of custom components (both commercial and free)
3. quality and availibility of development tools like RAD window builder, platform for automate gui testing..etc.
4. native look and feel vs custom look and feel
5. learning curve (related to point one) / ease of development

notice: I have only commercial experience with SWT on small project and my swing experience is so small that can't be taken seriously - my knowledge is rather theoretical than practical.

Briefly after my SWT/Eclipse RCP experience - on next project I would choose Swing. It api seems for me easier than SWT (you haven't got to manage disposing components by hand to prevent memory leaks, you adding component to panel instead of constructing components with parent panel information, former is closer to my previous experience...etc.), native look and feel you can get in swing too, overall performance is enough good (swt should be faster because it's using native components of backed OS - but is the performance gain really big pro? i don't think so..). And there is lot of more custom components in Swing than in SWT (this is very big pro for swing).