What a stupid argument. You had the same situation with AWT and Swing, Swing being build on top of AWT. And Sun didn't improve AWT at all, but instead spent a lot of time to decouple Swing from AWT. And AWT was left at the roadside, dying a slow death. In particular many Swing components now directly talk to the hardware without using AWT, which was exactly not the idea of lightweight components. Another great example: MS-DOS underneath Windows. Did it help DOS in any way that some piece of even worse rubbish was running on top of it? No, it didn't. The top rubbish was developed forward (rewritten from scratch), the layer below abandoned, and a mockup of it reimplemented. I think Sun is lying when they say that Swing benefits from JavaFX. Sun let JDCI die. And as we have just learned, Sun silently stopped funding SwingX already in July - they didn't even have the balls to tell people. Hint: July was also the month when Sun released the first public preview of the JavaFX SDK. Coincidence? I don't think so. Sun bet the farm on JavaFX in July. And don't give me that scenegraph crap. How many people need scenegraphs compared to how many people would need a working file chooser, a working table, or treetable? BTW, voting here won't change a iota. Even in the very unlikely event that a Sun decision maker would get the results, they couldn't care less. They never listen to desktop developers on principle.

Then and now I still hope for Swing to one day provide a real seamless desktop integration, including all the features that eventually might apply here (most dearly missed at the moment is the ability to allow for cross-platform hotkeys to make the window of a SystemTray application pop-up and do something on demand).

Why does Sun not do work on making it easier and or natural to create Swing based RIA Applications with a Java EE backend? It's so silly of them to not see this big gaping disconnect of the technologies. Swing needs to be evolved to allow for the creation of the Internet based applications of the 21'st century. More applications are being run off of the net (Webstart helps out a lot here), and hence the vast jungle of HTML based web frameworks out there struggling to get developers to be more productive in trying to handle the common items that pop up in trying to do RIA with HTML + JavaScript. Why doesn't Sun do the same with Swing which inherently is a desktop technology but without any soul for meeting the needs of developers wanting to use Swing as an easy to develop desktop front end technology for a Java EE back-end application? There is a framework out there called OpenSwing that's trying to fill this gap, but I still think it's too complex. The best I've seen out of the blocks recently so far is Wicket. Wicket is Swing done in Html + JavaScript. It's a beautiful easy to use web framework for Java Developers used to doing good OOD work or developers used used to working with Swing. I think it will do well for it to have a cousin that does desktop on the web natively though. That is where Swing comes in.

Java Web Start, Swing, and JOGL are some of your biggest assets. Make them even stronger! Your contenders are not Adobe AIR (LOL) or Microsoft SilverLight (even more LOL) but QT and GTK+. Did you realize people do real-world applications with Java? Here's some of the cool stuff: Quaqua, Freemind, yEd Graph Editor, Photo Tourism, not to speak of IDEs. Did you know MS still does VS with MFC? Did you see their poor attempt at bringing Outlook to the web (OWA)? Only works in their own anachronistic browser! Adobe's flashy player is popular because of some video codecs that they don't even own. You can pull that stunt, too: Make OGG Vorbis and Theora work! Some media sites are already using Vorbis. Give them a player and a snazzy encoder! JavaFX? At the time you have a working product, all "constrained devices" will be running Swing + SVG + OpenGL! Did you know Nokia already has OpenGL Games on some of their handsets? Don't alienate your existing developer base! We are still legion.

Swing the GUI toolkit is the common part for all languages e.g. scala, groovy, java understand Swing because swing is make with the Java language and the bytecode generated for java is understand for all others languages this is not the case with the bytecode generated with JavaFx, because this bytecode is only understand with JavaFx. Interoperability between languages is need and JavaFx do not produce this.