So the JavaLobby survey results are in. JGoodies wins by a landslide. So why does the author of the survey, himself a JGoodies fan, feel compelled to spend his next column talking about "Per Platform Polishing of Your Look and Feel with Patches"?

WinLaF is a project at http://www.java.net that fixes some look and feel problems in the default look and feel on Windows. By problems I am specifically referring to areas where the emulated look and feel is not faithful to the native appearance. Quaqua is a similar project to WinLaF, but for the OS X look and feel suite.

Nice. Not only is Sun working their tail off to get Windows right and Apple's Java team throwing resources into having a platform-specific Aqua LaF, there are now two projects to slap atop those efforts to try and close the deal. I mean crimminy, look at what they're bothering to fix. The looks aren't close to done. Remember how far away native looks already were in Swing and how things like mouse wheel implementation lagged like mad? Well, now we have yet another QA issue nightmare.

"Maybe that's the native LaF on that platform."
"Perhaps. Are they using with Java 1.4.01."
"Not sure. Think it might because they're trying to run WinLaF on 1.3?"

The headaches.

Here's the deal -- people are used to deploying Java apps in controlled environments, where if you don't have 1.5.1 installed, the IT group can force it on you tomorrow, no matter what that breaks, and can force the uninstallation of whatever else useful you might have installed, all so that their software finally works.
As long as that mentality prevails, where the customer is always wrong, Java coders won't be ready for true client side apps.

That said, JGoodies' Book Finder application does look fairly good. ;^) I wouldn't recommend using it, obviously, but at least they're trying.