James Strachan, of Jaxen and dom4j fame and Guinness World Record candidate for most prolific open-source hacker kicking off an open-source project every other day, created JellySwing. James comments in his blog (http://james.weblogger.com):

JellySwing is similar to Thinlets in that XML markup is used to define a Swing UI, but JellySwing can support dynamic XML, that is embedding expressions (like Velocity or the new JSP expression language), custom tags, iteration over SQL, XML or just simply working with bean models and the like. So a single JellySwing script can create the view and bind in the model and controllers in a similar way to you might do in a web application via MVC model II.

Swing over for Jelly to http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/jelly/jellyswing.html