I've written a series of classes to interperate data from a serial port. This data needs to be displayed on the screen. I am trying to go for straight up eye candy with a refined look.
Swing UI- Easy to program, yeilds mediocre results Open GL- Hard to program, yeilds good results.
Are there any other options?
Give SWT a go, the API is a lot simpler than Swing. Here is a recent question outlining the differences between SWT and Swing.
I'm not aware of any alternatives, but in my opinion it is possible to write beautiful GUI with Swing. Just changing the ugly default look and feel goes a long way. Visual appeal just doesn't seem to be a top priority for most Java coders and therefore you have to make an effort to make anything pretty.
You can use NetBeans combined with JOGL (Java bindings for OpenGL) or simply with Java2D.
NetBeans has an easy GUI Builder for Swing applications -- you can make beautiful interfaces (if you get into it), easily change the Look&Feel, etc etc.., and you can use Java2D or JOGL for visualizing your data and embed it in the GUI to display it.
There's a plugin for JOGL for NetBeans so getting started is hassle free.
use html, css, javascript. Much easier to get wizz-bang UI than using Swing or related technologies.
For my projects at work, we have purchased a licence of JFormDesigner. This is really a great tool that saved us a lot of time.
Writing Swing application by hand can be a real pain and is awful to maintain.
This tool choose the right approach : The model-view-controller. The GUI builder creates XML files for you that represent the interface. These XML files are loaded at runtime and transformed into Swing objects. The builder also generates Java stubs that you can fill with event handlers.
It also handles Localization and nice layout goodies.
Give it a try.