The debut of Java's Swing UI toolkit spurred many developers to try their hands at building Java rich-client applications. While many large-scale Swing applications emerged over the years, many more developers felt that creating robust and clean Swing apps was really hard.

Much investment in recent years, from Sun as well as from the open-source community, led to a Swing renaissance, however, with not just one, but three application frameworks in development: the NetBeans Rich-Client Platform (RCP), the Eclipse RCP, and the Spring RCP. The latter builds on the successful Spring framework, and extends Spring's concepts to rich-client applications:

The spring-rich developers strongly feel the old days of Swing apps not looking native and not being performant or web-accessible are gone with JDK1.4.2 and 1.5 and webstart. It is our belief the only problem with Swing is that there are a limited number of higher-level abstractions available that assist in making the toolkit simpler and easier to use, and a limited number of design best practices. The goal of spring-richclient is to provide that.

Spring RCP features several high-level abstractions, such as:

• A way to build structured, highly-configurable, GUI-standards-following Swing applications faster by leveraging the Spring Framework
• Integration with existing rich-client-related projects where it make sense.
• Adheres to the principles set forth by the Spring Framework—programming to interfaces; the importance of sound OO design, documentation, and testing.

More specifically, Spring RCP provides:

• A command framework that provides centralized configuration of Swing actions and appropriate handler registration based on the current active view. Command configuration, as well as action bar contribution policies [..] can be defined centrally and externalized in Spring bean definitions.
• A forms data binding and validation framework.
• Support for multiple window management, page configuration, and view management. [..] Views can be defined in the Spring container, associated with one or more pages, and a default page can be configured to be loaded at startup.
• Common support classes addressing various rich client requirements including: well formed dialogs, wizards, input validation (typing hints and validation results reporting), button bars,internationalization, image/icon caching, progress monitoring, UI threading (classes cleanly promoting responsive UIs), treetable/property sheet, table sorting/high-volume table updates, GUI standards builders/helpers, help/about, etc.

With frameworks such as the Spring RCP, what do you think lies in the future of Swing application development?