I have developed many desktop applications in Swing, even those a bit more complex, with Hibernate and Spring integration. I found out that many things repeats and should be done quickly and in convenient way, like application lifecycle, logging, alerts, authorisation, forms and their validation. I started looking for frameworks. I met Swing Application Framework which is dead since several years, as it turned out. Spring RCP really met with my expectations, especially creating forms basing on Java Bean model is what I liked, but I realised it is dead too. Netbeans RCP is not for me, I am using Eclipse and I don’t want to use another IDE for desktop development. I am not really excited about Eclipse RCP, I got feeling that it is too Eclipse oriented, I would prefer something low coupled to any tool, besides it is not so straightforward to learn.
I am surprised that there is so weak support for developing desktop-based business applications in Java. It’s like Java was only used in web environment. What is the preferred language for making such apps then? And if I want to stay with Java, is there a chance to find something similar to Spring RCP (so far I couldn’t)?
i asked a similar question some time ago, see Swing desktop-development if you are interested.
My conclusion was/is that there simply are no frameworks that can do for your desktop-application, what any of the bazillion great WEBframeworks can do for your webapplication. It seems absurd, but in my experience due to the great web-frameworks and the lack of desktop-frameworks it has become much easier to develop a webapplication.
I have been using Spring-RCP for 2 projects. It was great, but is pretty much unusable nowadays, because you are stuck to spring 2.5 with it. Also it “feels” a bit slow to me and is really memory hungry on 64-bit machines, which is a Spring-Swing problem most likely: https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SPR-9628
I waited for Project Valkyrie, but it seems to be dead already
I think you will not find anything that completely covers your requirements. http://swingx.java.net/ could maybe offer you a few GUI-Widgets, like JXDatePicker. I also recommend JGoodies Binding and JGoodies Form, both are great. IF you use a client-server application i highly recommend using Spring-Remoting (e.g. HTTP Invoker) with Spring-Security. Really makes things simpler.
I enjoy developing desktop-apps with Swing, but unfortunatly you really have to “go the extra mile”. Client-Server-communication, security or even validation are only a few examples of the many things that seem overcomplicated these days (compared to modern webframeworks). Also you might find out that it is not as easy to automatically build, sign and deploy an application with java-webstart as it should be.
Spring-RCP was the closest thing to a “complete” desktop-framework that i found so far and it has been dead for years.
Good Luck!