Introduction
If you want to develop a desktop application with Java you most likely will use Swing, the standard GUI Toolkit for Java. Many developers complain about the complexity of the Swing API and you may have heard about Swing's deployment and performance issues.
Java WebStart lets you deploy Java desktop application just as easy as a web application and with Java SE 6 your application looks and feels like a native application.
Developing a desktop application with plain Swing is like developing a web application with only servlets.
If you want to develop a web application there are plenty of frameworks available but if you want to develop a desktop application
with Java there is not much to choose from.
Jazz Desktop Application Framework
You don't have to be a Swing expert to develop your next application with Jazz. In fact you don't have to know anything about JFrame's, JDialog's, listeners and models like you do with Swing. Jazz hides the complexity of Swing with a much simpeler API and provides powerful
features to develop professional looking cross-platform desktop applications out-of-the-box.
An application architecture based on the Hierarchical-Model-View-Controller pattern makes it easy to develop your application in a modular way. Developers can build/test their part without getting in the way of other developers working on the same application.
Swing is single-threaded and developers have difficulties handling the Event-Dispatch-Thread. With Jazz EVERYTHING is done asynchronously! A developer does not have to worry about multi-threading at all, the framework takes care of that.
Jazz comes with a powerful set of components for building the user interface of your application. Components have build-in support for data binding, validation, internationalization and are typesafe using generics. List/table have standard support for sorting, filtering and searching. When you sort/filter a list/table the currently selected row(s) remain selected.
Unlike other frameworks/rich client platforms Jazz has a very small footprint (450kb) which makes it ideal for use with Java Webstart. Jazz is actively developed and is used in production in applications all over the world. We hope for your next application you use Jazz and let your GUI Swing!