Current java desktop blueprint / state-of-art?

Question

I've been away from Java programming (except some Android dev) and desktop apps but now I want to develop a Java desktop app as a personal project. So I wonder, what's the current blueprint for this kind of app? Is still Swing and JDBC?
Having said that, would also recommend that set of technologies for a simple project? As an analogy, I don't want to read a 800 pages book on J2EE just to do a simple web page, if you know what I mean.

Thanks

Answer 1

Do a little prototyping and choose:

• Swing: Most resources, most used, lot of 3rd party free stuff (SwingX etc.), kick ass look and feels, really cross platform, nice IDE support. Swing is going to be improved in next JDK release, so it's still pretty much in game. NetBeans IDE and IntelliJ IDEA are written in Swing.
• SWT: Alternative which uses facilities of operating systems on which it is implemented. SWT community is smaller and it doesn't provide that many tools as Swing does. It's a little more tricky to do cross platform, you need to make actual comiplation on all OS you are going to ship your app on. Eclipse IDE is written in SWT.
• QT: Cross platform solution with lots of users. It's pretty popular amongst C++ users. On the other hand, I've never seen powerful tools for Java+QT as for Swing or SWT. I don't consider QT as "true Java" solution, but you might have different idea.
• Java FX : Since 2007, Sun tries to persuade us to use this declarative approach for building RIA. I've seen lots of tutorials but I never liked Java FX and I am not alone at all. JavaFX tries to be only UI solution, it does NOT replace Swing.

There is probably much more, but this is what I tried. From those, I liked Swing. It's pretty mature now. There are bazillion of tutorials over here. Yes, some things are pretty painful with Swing, but overally I think it's still best desktop choice for Java.

Another intersting thing, if you're into declarative UI, is YAML. Check this pdf book.

As for second part, JDBC is still pretty popular, but you might think of some ORM framework (you can easily google some or looke here on stackoverflow, most popular one is Hibernate).