Spending a few minutes a day reading "Filthy Rich Clients" would already help.
Sun is the one to blame, as traditional UNIX company their Swing team just didn't had any clue about the desktop world, outside enterprise walls.
Oracle is actually doing much more than Sun ever did, they introduced a way to package applications with Java 8, originally part of the JavaFX project, and are adding support for AOT compilation (it was tabu at Sun) and application specific runtimes.
Sun is the one to blame, as traditional UNIX company their Swing team just didn't had any clue about the desktop world, outside enterprise walls.
Oracle is actually doing much more than Sun ever did, they introduced a way to package applications with Java 8, originally part of the JavaFX project, and are adding support for AOT compilation (it was tabu at Sun) and application specific runtimes.