Natural way to develop UI

Important detail is how we will transform higher level UI abstractrions into a final representation. Atomic block in "old UI" composition is a widget. Atomic block in JavaFX/WPF is a 2D graphic primitive. These technologies treat Classical Widget as a composite of lower-level primitives, and these primitives available on every platform (which is not true for Widget-based approach) - just to support Jim van Dam's run everywhere point. This is not conceptual shift, but

• Few years ago we were not able to develop such UIs due to CPU/GPU performance limitations (and this was the main reason why SWT was born).
• Now, scaling down to lower-level primitives gives new very attractive possibilities like: run everywhere (if something can provide adequate CPU/GPU power and runtime), clean separation of UI represenation and UI logic (we may expect designers working on desktop designs in the near future like we see in Web design market), flexible UI customization at run time and at any level (in WPF I can override Button look-and-feel for example adding rotate and scale transorm, adding few lines around caption, etc... I can completely replace look-and-feel of my button at application or window level - and all these will be vector graphics - just forget about pixels)! This is also very attractive from UI components reusing and representation inheritance standpoints, etc. Of course there are much more benefits we can figure out...

So regarding buzz - I do not think this is a buzz, but natural evolution of UI started with SVG and Flash; higher-level technologies like Flex; and continued with JavaFX/WPF. It is constantly running evolution during last years, and finally we have these technologies ready for end-users, and end-users have PCs powerful enough to run such UIs. So there is a trend to decomposite UI down to 2D (3D? :)) primitives. And such decomposition rules will be fully controled/defined by application, which is contrary to original SWT idea and goal.