I have used Swing a bit more than the author of the article did, and it really took Sun way to long to improve upon it. Before Java 6 it had some noticeable gap

I have used Swing a bit more than the author of the article did, and it really took Sun way to long to improve upon it. Before Java 6 it had some noticeable gaps and the performance was rather bad. But since then it's not that bad in that regard, you'll even get your System Tray icons (Sun used to be _very_ conservative about that. If it's not available everywhere, no soup for you.) And any GUI toolkit is complex. Often this is hidden behind IDE boilerplate code or GUI builders, but it's there. Once you get the hang of Swing, you're able to adapt it to your liking a lot (event handling, custom UI elements etc.). I still remember early X11 toolkits that appeared to be easy, but once you went beyond their boundaries, it was "drop down to Xlib" time. Regarding the look and feel: Strangely enough the one platform that cares the least about that is Windows. Yes, the old Metal L&F sticks out, but once you stick to the system colors, any differences vanish. The typical user probably already uses lots of so-called native apps that look differently, as every Office release has new kinds of toolbar buttons etc, there's still apps out with huge check marks and crosses on their OK/Cancel buttons etc. The main issue I had with Swing here was getting the "feel" okay, i.e. drag-and-drop, shortcuts, the behavior of tree elements... Of course, on Mac, everything that isn't done in Cocoa looks and feels alien. It's possible to get rather close with Swing and Qt, but it takes a lot of effort.