The rise of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) has
lately become an important topic in the Java community. In addition to
new technologies like AJAX and MacroMedia Flex, the combination of
Swing and Java Web Start has also been proposed as a RIA technology.
Much
people criticize Swing because of the lack of data binding and POJO
(plain old Java objects) support. Recently some efforts have been done
to create a data binding layer that simplify data setting onto the
graphical components (see JDNC project).
Also a reference framework is needed to develop Swing applications,
expecially for beginner Swing programmers. Recently some efforts has
been done to design an Advanced Swing Framework (JSR 296).
However this may represent a future step, not a current available solution; moreover these attempts do not still provide a complete solution
(a framework and advanced swing components with data binding
capabilities) to quickly develop rich-client applications; in addition,
Swing components are just hard to use: creating a powerful table or a
tree component usually requires a lot of code and time and skills.
OpenSwing
is an open-source Swing framework that provides an MVS architecture and
automates communication between models, views, and controllers by means
of Java Beans (POJO), directly connected to view components. It also
provides a suite of advanced graphics components based on Swing
components with data binding between components and data model.
It is possibile to apply this framework to develop java stand-alone
applications, without an underlying database, or to develop more
classic two layered client-server applications (front-end + database)
or to develop three tiered web applications (Swing front-end + HTTP +
java servlet + database), or to develop distributed rich-client
applications (Swing front-end + server side applications remotely
accessed via RMI or another protocol + database).
You can access it at 
[ Lien ]