What I find a better alternative to Electron is to use the browser control of JavaFX (WebKit). You can program your UI in HTML/CSS/JS, and interact very easily

What I find a better alternative to Electron is to use the browser control of JavaFX (WebKit). You can program your UI in HTML/CSS/JS, and interact very easily with business logic written in Java, Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, Groovy, Ceylon, etc. (also JS, if you want). JavaFX comes included with the standard JVM. I imagine this approach will get even better with Java 9, especially the size of distributables.