I've been trying to think of a way to humbly announce that no lesser authority than Evans Data Corporation has reported that Swing is the dominant GUI Toolkit for Northern American developers. It's difficult to present this new statistic with the grace and humility of good sportsmanship because, after nearly 8 years of steady growth:

"Java Swing with 47% use, has surpassed WinForms as the dominant GUI development toolkit, an increase of 27% since fall 2004."

That's a direct quote from the Spring 2005 report. You may want to read it again (I have). There are more developers building applications using Swing and Java SE than WinForms and .NET. Despite the titanic resources marshalled by Microsoft to assert dominance over their own desktop platform, the Swing community has grown into an unstoppable force. Microsoft has often been referred to as an "eight hundred pound gorilla". Thanks to the persistence and enthusiasm of Swing developers everywhere, we've thrown the gorilla and the cage off the island. We're the new alpha male, we're the King Kong of GUI toolkits. We are the force to be reckoned with. We are number one!.

I realize that was a little over the top. I'm supposed to be humble and quietly confident about our success and not indulge in all of this vulgar gloating and boasting and jumping up and down on the desk shouting, we're number one, we're number one, we're number ...

Sorry about that.

I'll just remain calm from here on in. You'll have to trust me when I say that I'm reporting the following from a peaceful and serene perspective. The use of both Swing and AWT have grown dramatically in the last year and, quoting from the report, "Java GUI development is clearly experiencing substantial growth". So it is. I would guess that there are at least two trends at work here. People are writing Swing clients to augment or replace browser clients for network services, and developers really do care about platform portability. Sometimes portability is just about spanning different versions of Windows but more often than not, it's about covering the growing "alternative" desktop market. Users want applications that provide entertainment or communication or educational experiences that are worthy of the fine computer hardware they're seated in front of, and the zippy internet service they're connected to. Developers are choosing Swing to deliver those experiences and here, at camp Swing headquarters, we couldn't be happier.

It's good to be king and it's hard to be humble. I feel a T-shirt coming.

Thanks to Jeff Dinkins for another bit of just-in-time artwork!