Our good friend and former colleague Greg Brown has just recently launched the first official 1.0 release of the open source Pivot Toolkit. The Pivot Toolkit provides Java developers a great new way to build applications with rich user interfaces that can be easily deployed both to web users and to desktop users.

Pivot harnesses the power of the Java2D API and packages it in a toolkit that offers these benefits:

• MVC architecture to separate controller logic from the view layer
• XML-based markup (WTKX) to design views including CSS-like style definition
• Easy integration with remote web data services
• Built-in charting capabilities based on JFreeChart

Check it out: http://pivot-toolkit.org/