I wouldn’t say that Flex or Silverlight offer anything truly new in terms of features, either. What they do offer is a different means of delivering those features – it is easier to build “rich” web functionality using those tools than it is in HTML.

For the record, I don’t necessarily associate “animations and video” with “RIA”. I think the “richness” in RIA comes as much from the availability of more desktop-like widgets as it does from the media features.

I haven’t dug into the code, so keep in mind my judgements are very surface level. Specifically from the demo I don’t see anything new. You yourself compare the Pivot demo to swing and gwt. I don’t think that many people would really consider either of those are very exciting demos. To me RIA also includes powerful animations, video, and flexible skinning as standard tools. Interactive forms are available now without the jre as jole pointed out. JavaFX, Flex, and Silverlight have that. Even dhtml is pretty good in that arena. Nothing in the demo showed me that side of things.

Pivot definitely works in OSX 10.5 – in fact, Leopard is my primary development platform. However, for some reason, it does not work in Firefox. I suspect it may have something to do with the issues described in this article, but I’m not sure:

http://javaplugin.sourceforge.net/Readme.html

The page comes up, but most of the controls are nonfunctional. I couldn’t get past the radio buttons.

As the developer of Pivot, I’d be curious to know what about the demo you found lacking. We think Pivot is a great platform, but it is also still quite new – we recognize that there will be a lot of room for improvement. It would also be helpful to understand what you are comparing it to as a metric. The demo is bare-bones, that’s for sure, but it is really only meant to give users a quick overview of some of the features Pivot provides. Compared to the original SwingSet or GWT’s Kitchen Sink demo, I think it holds up pretty well.

Personally, I’m not terribly excited about JavaFX. As I mentioned in the original post, I want to build rich client applications in Java, not a new scripting language. Also, JavaFX is built on top of Swing, which suffers from a number of legacy issues (discussed in the blog). This is just my opinion, of course, but if anything seems destined for a niche role, I think it is JavaFX.

That said, I’m not too impressed by the demo. I give the guy props for all the work, though. Maybe there’s a niche for it, but I doubt it will get much traction once javaFX gets really rolling.

Qt Jambi integrates with Eclipse and comes with Qt Designer.

“Qt Designer makes it easy to visually design advanced user interfaces – at any time, you can generate the code required to reproduce and preview your interface, changing and adjusting your design as often as you like.

Qt Designer helps you build cross-platform user interfaces with layout tools that move and scale your controls (widgets) automatically at runtime, taking font sizes and language use into consideration. The resulting interfaces are both functional and native-looking, comfortably suiting your users’ operating environments and preferences.”

“The intuitive Qt API includes all the functionality needed to develop advanced cross-platform applications. The Qt class library is implemented in C++, and provides support for C++ development and Javaâ„¢ programming through Qt Jambiâ„¢. “