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I've built a number of applications with Swing, but Swing is just so primitive. Every GUI I build has to reimplement all of the usual application lifecycle and menu stuff. No one uses swing Swing partly for this reason. Unfortunately, I understand that Sun now Oracle uses the lack of users as a justification to dump it. If you're old enough to remember the birth of Java, you'll recall that all the excitement about it came down to one word: Applets. That is pretty funny because of course no one uses it for applets. Why not? AWT, the windowing library at the time, was terrible. Swing was meant to fix this and, years later after they fixed the speed issues, it's actually okay (though it still pretty low level). The problem was and is that it's not an application framework and we build applications not widgets.
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There are lots of people still building GUIs, but most of these are internally used by corporations and government organizations that aren't necessarily going to blog about their competitive advantage (e.g., trading software) or give out their software. You can check out some sample applications built with the NetBeans platformPlatform. I notice that lots of those organizations still building GUIs are flush with cash: banks, the military, the government, ...
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In closing, let me thank Geertjan Wielenga for giving the NetBeans workshop (an excellent instructor and nice guy) and Andreas Stefik for helping explain more about the NetBeans platform Platform via his SodBeans IDE for the visually impaired.
Sam Harwell, Colin Bean, Udo Borkowski, Shaoting Cai and I are using NetBeans platform Platform to build a new ANTLRWorks grammar IDE. More on that later. Here are a few snapshots of the editor for grammars and StringTemplates that Sam working within a few days:
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