Question { 4430 }

what is AWT

Answer

What is AWT?
he Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) is Java's platform-
independent windowing, graphics, and user-interface widget
toolkit. The AWT is part of the Java Foundation Classes
(JFC) - the standard API for providing a graphical user
interface (GUI) for a Java program.

When Java was released, AWT was heavily criticized as one of
the weakest components of Java. The basic flaw was that AWT
provided only a very thin level of abstraction over the
underlying native user interface. For example, creating an
AWT check box would cause AWT to directly call the
underlying native subroutine that created a check box.
Unfortunately, a check box on Windows is not quite the same
as a check box on MacOS or the various types of UNIX.

This poor design choice made life difficult for programmers
trying to adhere to Java's "write once, run anywhere" motto,
since AWT did not guarantee precisely how their application
would look on all computer platforms. An AWT application
that might look great on a Windows PC would turn out to be
an unusable mess on a Macintosh system, and vice versa. A
popular joke among programmers in the 1990s was that Java's
real motto was "write once, test everywhere." One of the
reasonable causes of this mediocrity is said to be that AWT
was conceptualized and implemented in only one month.

In J2SE 1.2, the AWT's widgets were largely superseded by
those of the Swing toolkit. Swing avoids the problems of AWT
by drawing its own widgets (by calling into low-level
subroutines in the local graphics subsystem), instead of
relying on the operating system's high-level user interface
module.