"Objectively, Java is now looking pretty good for use in desktop applications: the speed for tasks that don't involve much object creation is excellent, Swing is stable though in need of scintillation with some fresh JComponents, SWT is available for people who want something else, Linux's new threads may improve responsiveness there, JRE 1.4.2 is available pretty much everywhere, and we have a zillion open source libraries--my current favourite is SwiXML."