Paul Hammant's Blog: Gui Development Costs

It appears to me that there there is a point where Swing becomes compelling. If you have a simple single user GUI app that requires DB persistence for fields in the form, choose MS Access (The original Data Binding design). If you have greater complexity and the willingness to develop using a real programming language (and still leverage data binding) choose Winforms.NET. With a slightly higher ceiling on complexity, choose SWT from the Eclipse effort. Swing comes in at more costly for simple apps, but is almost your only choice for hugely complex (layered, tiered, MVC apps). It is also more testable (refer MarathonMan). Delphi, legendary Next/Mac tools, IFC, and Flash left off the graph. Of course, this is my subjective personal opinion....