The problem is that even though Java GUIs tend to suck, web app guis suck more. I'm probably going to get a fair bit of hate from this, but seriously, web apps

The problem is that even though Java GUIs tend to suck, web app guis suck more. I'm probably going to get a fair bit of hate from this, but seriously, web apps are a pain. - they have the browser's baggage. Address bar, back/forward buttons, etc - They don't use native widgets... except for some places (form widgets) - They're slow - They can't integrate with other desktop apps (drag and drop, saving to local disk, heck, even loading from local disk sucks) While web-app style development is going to get better, I somehow hope we could get to the "write your UI in a GUI description language, develop your logic separately, talking to a network server" stage without being stuck with compatibility baggage resulting from needing to be compatible with the browser. To be clear on what I mean -- Yes, currently developing and deploying desktop apps isn't fun. Who wants to write reams upon reams of code to pack widgets into containers, or whatever layout-method-du-jour your toolkit is using, when you can simply type some XML to describe your UI? Who wants to use a slow installer after a slow download to get an app installed? Web apps win here. However, web apps -- by design -- are unable to integrate properly into a desktop. They're trapped in a browser, cut off from interaction with the rest of your UI, and if they weren't, it would be an insanely bad design decision. On the flip side, with things like Glade, designing a desktop GUI is starting to hurt far far less. I think that pushing desktop app development frameworks towards being far more network aware, easily deployable, and faster to develop will lead to far, far better results than trying to make web apps not suck, while dragging the web browser legacy junk onto desktoplike web apps. [edit - expand on ideas]