Re: the right way to do rich clients

Hello,

For years my basic architecture has been a Swing Applet for the client,
an application on the server, rmi to connect the two, and straight jdbc
for persistence (recently changed to Hibernate) at the server side.
POJOs all the way.

In a desire to drop rmi and use a more web-friendly comm scheme, I
started reading about all the technologies that I've bee woefully
ignorant of, including: JBoss, servlets, SOA-SOAP, jsf, jsp, ...
possibly others. Everything I've seen seems to use form-based html for
the UI. Ick. The apps I'm involved with simply require a Swing-like
UI.

So, my question is: In the years I've been under my rock, what
technologies have come along that I should use to do rich clients in a
web-like way? Also, I've seen disparaging remarks about using Applets
for "real" projects -- what is the preferred technology (I suppose
WebStart?)?

All comments very welcome.