Is XML or XUL the future of Java GUI building?

Question

After spending a lot of time and code on programming in Swing, I thought this can't be state-of-the-art Java GUI building. After not finding a user-friendly visual gui bilder for eclipse I stumbled upon declarative GUI building with XML UI toolkits... and I thought: This must be it! I think it's the right way to go, easy and also close to web-programming.

But after looking around in the web and on SO, I got the impression that it is not very common! Although there are many implementations and APIs, it seems like most of them are kind of dead and had no updates in the last 5 years..

So I wonder: Is my feeling right, that XML is not very widespread for java GUIs? And if so - what are the reasons? Maybe it couldn't become accepted or it has some major drawbacks or people are doing everything in the web instead with fatclients or there are better alternatives, maybe javafx?

I just need to know if it is worth spending time in that area or better look for alternate ways. As I dont read developer magazines I just don't know what the trends in gui building are and which technologies are believed to have a future. But I can't imagine that people still spend so much time on writing nasty swing (or swt) apps.

Answer 1

There new fresh and interesting approach - it uses YAML. Check it out at http://code.google.com/p/javabuilders/

Answer 2

Sun's answer to that seems to be JavaFX.

It has a declarative language for specifying the GUI and there will be builder apps as well.