Swing popularity rising

Years ago I developed several Swing application – most of them are still being used now. Later I switched to webapplication using http, javascript and html. I do like thinking about client-server communication, distributed software, databases and other parts of enterprise development. I never liked devoping client frameworks using any of the many webapplication frameworks like jsp/servlets, struts2, jsf. Somehow they never give the same ease of use. Usually it takes a lot more them having the application behave good, and still the GUI is slower and less responsive for the user. Even applicationd developed using advanced ajax frameworks like GWT are as good as application once written in Visual Basic or Delphi – considering a computer is now-a-days a whole lot faster.

Fortunately for developers Swing seems to be rising in popularity a lot. On Javaworld there are published articles on Swing, like this one on The Swing Cookbook, and on Dzone I found a weblog on Swing, or more specifically Java Desktop.
One of the reasons of the increasing popularity might by JSR 296, a standard for Swing. The standard is in development since 2006, but seems to be getting more attention lately. In a posting on JSR 296 and Swing suggests Swing might become obsolete – as Sun concerns-  because of JavaFX. I don’t think (hope) Swing will disappear any time soon. Sun has a new architect on JSR 296 since last year, although there’s not that much progress on development or updates. On JSpring, a popular conference on Java in the Netherlands, there a session on JSR296, allthough Javapolis (now Devoxx) there was a talk on JSR-296 in 2006 already.  I’ll be curious what will be told in that session.