The rise of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) has lately become an important topic in the Java community. In addition to new technologies like AJAX and MacroMedia Flex, the combination of Swing and Java Web Start has also been proposed as a RIA technology.

Much people criticize Swing because of the lack of data binding and POJO (plain old Java objects) support. Recently some efforts have been done to create a data binding layer that simplify data setting onto the graphical components (see JDNC project).
Also a reference framework is needed to develop Swing applications, expecially for beginner Swing programmers. Recently some efforts has been done to design an Advanced Swing Framework (JSR 296).
However this may represent a future step, not a current available solution; moreover these attempts do not still provide a complete solution (a framework and advanced swing components with data binding capabilities) to quickly develop rich-client applications; in addition, Swing components are just hard to use: creating a powerful table or a tree component usually requires a lot of code and time and skills.

OpenSwing is an open-source Swing framework that provides an MVS architecture and automates communication between models, views, and controllers by means of Java Beans (POJO), directly connected to view components. It also provides a suite of advanced graphics components based on Swing components with data binding between components and data model.

It is possibile to apply this framework to develop java stand-alone applications, without an underlying database, or to develop more classic two layered client-server applications (front-end + database) or to develop three tiered web applications (Swing front-end + HTTP + java servlet + database), or to develop distributed rich-client applications (Swing front-end + server side applications remotely accessed via RMI or another protocol + database).

You can access it at: http://oswing.sourceforge.net/