The Abstract Window Toolkit

The Java Development Kit contains a set of widget- and utility classes for creating simple graphical user-interfaces: the Abstract Window Toolkit or AWT. Small applications with user-interfaces are often called Applets. Main features of the AWT are: Many classes in AWT define components that represent some type of user-interface element. Examples are:

Some classes define containers: they hold other graphical objects, possibly laid out by means of a layout manager. Containers are also components. A dialog box is an example of a container.