Alright you swing all stars, the source code for Extreme GUI Makeover is out courtesy of Scott Violet. Remember haters, it's a 'demo' app...

Just read this and thought I'd recommend. He definitely prefers thick clients instead of Ajax. It's pretty good; the next time I start a new project and use a thick client to app server, I'll definitely consider Spring Remoting based on this article. I can't believe how easy it is to switch protocols b/w rmi and http with no code change. What I really like is that he's created a J2EE server, and shown the way for a thick client for the view instead of web pages.