Did you ever hear about Pivot? Well, we did not - but what we read sounded good:

„Pivot is an open-source framework for building high-quality, cross-platform applications that are easily deployable both via the web and to the desktop. It began as an R&D effort at VMware and is now being made available to the community as an option for developers who want to build rich client applications in Java...“

While Pivot was designed to be familar to web developers who have experience building AJAX applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it provides a much richer set of standard widgets than HTML, and allows developers to create sophisticated user experiences much more quickly and easily. Pivot will also seem familiar to Swing developers, as both Swing and Pivot are based on Java2D and employ a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture to separate component data from presentation. However, Pivot includes additional features that make building modern GUI applications much easier, including declarative UI, data binding, and web services integration....

Pivot is Applet based which proves again that the reincarnation of applets has started - have a look into the Pivot demo area which gives you an overview on the available controls: in the space of web development we would call a control library like the Pivot library a "very large and rich library" since the library offers all kind of controls for professional user interface development.

User interface development with Pivot is similar to what most Rich Client frameworks do: there is a declarative language which enables you to define the user interface, the user interface definition is stored with the extension .wtkx.

At runtime, the Pivot applet loads the user interface definition (the wtkx file) and translates the definition to controls. As we are in the space of an applet you can code your application events and listener directly in Java, have a look into the Pivot tutorial which will give you a quick introduction.

Unfortuantely Pivot is not well documented and as it is one of the Newcomer frameworks you will not be ablle to find large Google search results. And, you will not be able to use a layout editor or something similar to create your user interface which currently is one of the biggest manquos.

But anyway, Pivot is an example that applets are still, around and that there certainly might rise more applet based frameworks in the future..