Having gained an interest in Java and JPA by means of the Play! Framework 1.x, I'm interested in doing similar for desktop apps.
Is there a Java framework for non-Web Desktop GUI apps that has the ease of development and ease of deployment that Play! web apps gives? Anything that abstracts all the intricacies and lets me just focus on code...
You can try Griffon, its based on Grails (groovy rulezzz) and abstracts a lot of the boilerplate code of desktop development in Java, also there is a netbeans plugin and you can use the matisse designer for the UI.