Agreed. I did quite a bit of Swing development a few years ago. There is also Griffon (http://griffon.codehaus.org/ http://griffon.codehaus.org/) that is a MVC

Agreed. I did quite a bit of Swing development a few years ago. There is also Griffon (http://griffon.codehaus.org/ http://griffon.codehaus.org/) that is a MVC (Rails like) framework for Swing apps that uses Groovy. I haven't used it, but from what I have seen, it does make it easier to work with Swing. I had not heard of swixml. Thanks for the pointer.