AWT and Swing is dead, JavaFX the latest desktop development tool which also supports CSS and themes. If you want to have a desktop feel in browser and you want to use Java, GWT is another option, but it's just as bulky as JavaFX, although much less than AWT and Swing.

It's been a while since I've done any desktop applications, so can't comment on what other solutions are available other than the .NET offerings.

Hmm, UI developement it's something weird in java these days, swing it's not longer mantained and javafx it's not the replacement for swing.

So for desktop development in java we don't have a good solution :(.

But if you want to work on web side then you have a lot of options, just write your java code, expose your services in a well define Rest interface and then create web application to consume your rest api.

I think that most of the projects are developed in that way these days.