From my work on SiteVision I’ve become quite fond of writing rich clients using applets or JavaWebStart, with Swing, and then connect back to the server for state. I can understand why not so many others are doing it though, since you more or less need a decent framework to handle all the issues, and as far as I know there aren’t any around.

Now I’m in the process of adding this functionality to Qi4j! There are two parts to using objects/entities on the client: finding them and loading/storing them. In Qi4j there are two interfaces EntityFinder and EntityStore which respectively deal with these things.