Thanks to a tweet from @bdelacretaz I discovered Apache Pivot today. It does indeed have a nice website, and the library itself looks great. It’s pitched as an RIA framework and mostly seems focussed on browser based deployment via applets. However, pivot apps can also be deployed as standalone applications which is where I think it’s most promising.

The killer feature as far as I can see, is the much richer set of components that are available, combined with a better set of customisation points such as effects, transitions, web queries and data binding. There are libraries to do most or all of this with Swing, but since it wasn’t designed for it up front, they tend to feel pretty clunky and “bolted-on”. Hopefully Pivot can avoid that.

Sadly, it does look a bit like you’re leaving Swing completely behind – if for no reason other than the look and feel is unlikely to match nicely with the Pivot themes without a lot of effort. While Pivot has a lot of components built-in, there are a vast world of custom Swing components around and it would be nice if you could leverage those.