Eclipse's Rich Client Platform aims to provide a way to reuse Eclipse components in standalone applications, not only in the IDE.

Interesting. With SWT being (in many people's opinion) a better UI toolkit than Swing, this could become a much better client platform than plain Java.

I installed my first serious Swing-based application in 1999, at a time when Swing was evolving very quickly. Since then however, very little seems to have happened at Sun regarding the Java UI platform. Too bad.