Swing applications are often criticized for their plain, 1990s look. With Apple's user interface becoming increasingly popular, and Microsoft's upcoming Vista release, the default Swing look will feel increasingly out of place on modern desktops.

Swing applications don't have to look boring, however, as Scott Violet, Shannon Hickey, and Romain Guy demonstrated at JavaOne earlier this year. Borrowing the popular extreme makeover TV show format, they transformed a plain-looking Swing mail client into a stunning example of modern UI design. Scott Violet now released both the demo itself, which can be run from the command line, as well as the full source code.

Here is a "before" image of the application:

And this is the UI after the makeover:

One lesson from this demo is that the Java APIs bundled with the JDK are increasingly merely foundational. API projects developed outside core JDK functionality are required even for desktop projects that previously didn't think of going beyond standard Swing classes. The most notable desktop project outside the JDK is SwingLabs, and many of the effects in the Extreme GUI Makeover take advantage of SwingLabs classes.

The demo also imparts the importance of the common-sense, but often overlooked aspect of GUI development of thinking of the user experience rather than just stitching together readily available UI components for an application. To improve the user experience, the most interesting GUI Makeover examples rely either on embellishing Swing components with custom painting code—such as adding drop-shadows to panels—or using already embellished versions of those components from the SwingLabs project.

The downloadable demo contains another interesting feature: use of the java.awt.Robot class. Robot must be one of the least-known classes in the JDK, albeit it has been around since JDK 1.3. Robot, in effect, allows you to create animated demos of rich-client Java applications by letting you post UI events to components, simulating a user interacting with the application. Scott Violet's demo walks you through the Extreme Makeover steps using Robot to animate the various UI changes.

The final lesson from the Extreme GUI Makeover demo is that creating stunning UIs is a lot of work. Spending so much effort on the user experience may seem inappropriate at first to server-side developers who are used to writing business logic or plumbing code. However, user experience is increasingly the differentiating factor for consumer-facing Web applications—in last's weeks interview with Artima, Bret Taylor, Google's developer products manager mentioned "user experience" no less than five times in a thirty-minute conversation about developer tools.

Do you agree that user experience is an increasingly important consideration for enterprise applications we well? If so, do you see yourself spending more time writing UI code?