Having spent a vast majority of the last 5 years in the J2EE realm, I’ve been an
interested albeit dormant observer of the SWT vs Swing battle.

SWT framework seems to have done a great job surfing the Eclipse wave and
is now a serious competitor to Sun’s Swing offering. Native underpinning gives
it a unsurpassable advantage over Swing in terms of looks (especially on XP)
and in terms of OS-specific features.

Swing isn’t dead yet, however. Ricard’s post on JGoodies
has resurrected my faith in Sun’s library. Maybe most of the complaints
can be solved by a little ingenuity.

Stepping away from the Java world for a bit, I’m very excitied to see the
progress of Trolltech’s Qt. Just seven years ago, my Visual C++/MFC-filtered
brain would not have even allowed for a possibility for an existence of an
OS-agnostic desktop UI library for C++.

Oh yeah, I forgot about XUL…On second thought, I’ll leave it for G.Bauer.