An increasing number of frameworks are appearing that I find particularly interesting. They're web AJAX frameworks where the details of the HTTP communication and of all the HTML and JavaScript on the front-end are hidden behind a Swing-like API.

Here are some of these new frameworks:

• NextApp's Echo2
• WingS
• Google's GWT

It's also worth mentioning that Canoo ULC also provides a Swing-like API, but they're trying to leap-frog AJAX altogether: they deploy Swing thin clients.

Even though this model is new and not yet "fully" proven, I find it very promising. Up until now, web developers have had to master multiple different technologies including Java, Servlets, JavaScript, HTML, HTTP, session management and cookies, and the idiosynchracies of various web browsers on a multitude of platforms.

These frameworks promise to collapse all of these layers down to one. That's tremendous.

So I was thinking, if what is essentially a Swing-like API can be used to build rich web applications, would it be possible to extend Swing in such a way that a deployment switch controls whether we produce a web application or a ... Swing application?

I suppose we could think of this in reverse: can an HTML look and feel be constructed for Swing?

The end result would be the same: we'd write a single application, using The Swing API (not a Swing-like API) and we'd be able to target the web without any extra effort.

So, my message in this blog is: I think Swing should venture in that direction.