Pivot is an open-source framework for building high-quality, cross-platform applications that are deployable both via the web and to the desktop. It began as an R&D effort at VMware but has now been made available to the community as an option for developers who want to build rich internet (RIA) applications in Java.

Sample Pivot application

Pivot applications are written using a combination of Java and XML and can be run either as an applet or as a standalone (optionally offline) desktop application. While Pivot was designed to be familiar to web developers who have experience building AJAX applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it provides a much richer set of standard widgets than HTML, and allows developers to create sophisticated user experiences much more quickly and easily. Pivot will also seem familiar to Swing developers, as both Swing and Pivot are based on Java2D and employ a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture to separate component data from presentation. However, Pivot includes additional features that make building modern GUI applications much easier, including declarative UI, data binding, effects and transitions, and web services integration.