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AWT vs Swing

Review the differences between AWT and Swing in a structured comparison table, then continue with related interview questions, quizzes, and similar topic comparisons.

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AWT vs Swing - A key comparison and difference of the topics or subjects that will help you understand which is best for your use case. Check out to compare Swing and AWT as very common job interview questions.

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Difference between AWT and Swing

AWT Topic one in this side-by-side comparison.

9 comparison rows currently available on this page.

Swing Topic two in this side-by-side comparison.

AWT	Swing Interview Online Test
AWT components are called Heavyweight component.	Swings are called light weight component because swing components sits on the top of AWT components and do the work.
AWT components are platform dependent.	Swing components are made in purely java and they are platform independent.
AWT components require java.awt package.	Swing components require javax.swing package.
AWT is a thin layer of code on top of the OS.	Swing is much larger. Swing also has very much richer functionality.
AWT stands for Abstract windows toolkit.	Swing is also called as JFC (Java Foundation classes). It is part of Oracle's Java Foundation Classes (JFC).
These feature is not available in AWT.	Swing has many advanced features like JTabel, Jtabbed pane which is not available in AWT. Also. Swing components are called "lightweight" because they do not require a native OS object to implement their functionality. JDialog and JFrame are heavyweight, because they do have a peer. So components like JButton, JTextArea, etc., are lightweight because they do not have an OS peer.
This feature is not supported in AWT.	We can have different look and feel in Swing.
Using AWT, you have to implement a lot of things yourself.	Swing has them built in.
With AWT, you have 21 "peers" (one for each control and one for the dialog itself). A "peer" is a widget provided by the operating system, such as a button object or an entry field object.	With Swing, you would have only one peer, the operating system's window object. All of the buttons, entry fields, etc. are drawn by the Swing package on the drawing surface provided by the window object. This is the reason that Swing has more code. It has to draw the button or other control and implement its behavior instead of relying on the host operating system to perform those functions.

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