The Java Posse did a really interesting interview this week, they talked to the engineers over at Swing Labs.

Java Posse Swing Labs Interview

They hit a lot of the same points that come up whenever people are talking about Swing: it’s too hard to do anything custom, Swing has a learning curve that is too steep, I’ve seen nice things in Swing but don’t have eight years to spend on the UI, etc.

What surprised me most is how the people at Swing Labs spent a lot of time talking about what they are doing to address these issues, I expected them to spend a decent amount of time being defensive. For instance, they are actively working on a Swing Application Framework that would be built on top of Swing to simplify development.

Check it out, and take a look at this year’s JavaOne Swing demo, Aerith (code coming soon).