SWT: A Developer's Notebook

Configuring Eclipse for SWT Development

To gain access to the promise of the SWT, you must first configure your development environment to allow access to the packages and libraries that contain both the thin Java layer as well as the compiled native layer. In this book, all examples are developed using Eclipse 3.0M8, but there is nothing to stop you from writing the code using any other available IDE, including Notepad or vi, with no changes necessary to the code.

How do I do that?

No matter what development tool you use, you must do two things before you can develop using the SWT:

• Add the SWT JAR to the compiler classpath.

• Add the native library for your platform to your Java Runtime Engine’s (JRE’s) library path.

If you are using Notepad or vi, do this by specifying command-line parameters at compile and execution time, as shown in Figure 1-4 and Figure 1-5.

Figure 1-4. Specifying the classpath from the command line

Figure 1-5. Specifying the location of the SWT classes and native library for the JRE

The same requirements apply even if you are using an environment such as Eclipse. The difference is that, in Eclipse, you can specify these settings using graphical tools on a per-project basis and have them applied every time you compile or run your code, just as if you were using an Ant script or a batch file from the command line. Since these are two distinct steps, each is covered in a separate lab in the following sections.