abstract Windowing toolkit (Java) (AWT)

The Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) summarizes interfaces for building graphical user interfaces. AWT is platform-independent and supports the implementation of programs that are visually comparable to native programs. In native programs, their graphical components are entirely oriented to the respective operating system used, such as Windows, Mac OS or Linux.

Specifically, AWT provides methods for basic drawing operations, event handling and some GUI components. However, with this only quite simple and by no means complex user interfaces can be realized.

The connection between the graphical components of an AWT user interface and the underlying platform is represented by so-called peer classes, which ultimately realize a partner for each of the involved sides. Thus the native appearance and behavior of the user interface is given in each case. On the other hand, this has the consequence that AWT only offers components that are available on each platform, in order to remain independent of a specific platform. This excludes the use of modern graphical elements. In addition, side effects are known from practice when using an AWT user interface under different operating systems.

AWT is also called a heavyweight component because the native widgets of the respective platform are used by AWT or because a peer is required in each case. This also means, for example, that each AWT component does not use the allocation of memory by Java, but accesses the resources of the native platform directly, and thus each AWT application must implement its own memory management.