On the desktop, Java is the obvious missing elephant in the room. Java was popular, the non-GUI parts of Java were fast enough, but there were no good GUI libr

On the desktop, Java is the obvious missing elephant in the room. Java was popular, the non-GUI parts of Java were fast enough, but there were no good GUI libraries. Java continues to be anathema on the desktop because of the number of crappy apps written with Sun's officially blessed UI library, Swing. It didn't have to be that way. I've written a pretty snappy app using the Eclipse platform, which is based on SWT, which uses platform-specific code. In retrospect it's clear that Sun's write-once, run-anywhere ideal, which was Java's biggest strength on the server, was a disaster on the desktop. Sun should have provided Java bindings to common platform UI libraries and encouraged their use. If they had done that, Java would have been a much bigger player on the desktop, and GUI development would not have lagged so far behind in adoption of modern languages.