AWT stands for Abstract Window Toolkit. It is a toolkit of classes with which a programmer can develop Graphics and Graphical User Interface components. AWT gives a front-end technology to Java using which a user can interact with a running process; the old style is scanf. Usage of GUI environment is easier even for a non-computer background person. A business man or an elementary school student is able to use email system and all the credit goes to GUI, which Java supports very extensively.
All the classes required for developing graphics and GUI are placed in the package java.awt and the classes required for event handling are placed separately in the sub package java.awt.event. These two are very big packages and contains lot of classes doing different functionalities. To study these classes, the whole tutorial can be divided into the following topics.
- Drawing graphics
- Studying layout managers
- Developing GUI components
- Handling events – Event handling
All are discussed in the above four links very elaborately and extensively
The Java API (generally known as Java help) including java.awt API can be downloaded from the following Sun (now owned by Oracle) Web site.