Yeah desktop Java gained a bad reputation because of a bloated JVM and poorly-designed Swing interface. However, if you ship your own JVM and use SWT instead o

Yeah desktop Java gained a bad reputation because of a bloated JVM and poorly-designed Swing interface. However, if you ship your own JVM and use SWT instead of Swing, most of the problems with using Java on the desktop go away. stephenr - maybe the reason you've only seen crappy Java desktop applications is because you didn't recognise the good ones as Java? For example, here are screenshots of my Java desktop accounting application I've been developing for 9 years: Mac: http://www.solaraccounts.co.uk/images/screenshots/invoices_mac.jpg http://www.solaraccounts.co.uk/images/screenshots/invoices_m... Windows: http://www.solaraccounts.co.uk/images/screenshots/invoices.jpg http://www.solaraccounts.co.uk/images/screenshots/invoices.j... Java with SWT uses native widgets and makes it easy to call platform-specific UI code, so the result can be almost identical to a native application.