I was recently involved in a development effort where the plan was to rewrite the client-side software in Java, to make it portable. Some members of the development team were reluctant to even consider Java, because the applications “look so bad”. They hadn’t seen any recent Java Swing applications. I had. You should take a good hard look at some of the work highlighted by the Swing Sightings page – http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/sightings/.

I was especially delighted by an old favorite of mine - ViewletBuilder. It is a fine example of a mature Java Swing application, which has just gotten better and better over the years.

Another eye-opener is Techdigm Office 2.0. Hey, look Mom, you can create an Office suite of applications using Java!

So, the next time someone starts spouting that drivel about Java applications “looking bad”, you know where to send them. The only reason for Java applications to look bad these days is poor programming. Let’s make sure we do our best to fix that.