In my experience, native clients are not dead, at least in some industries when it makes sense (eg visualisation heavy or processing heavy applications and applications where offline access is desired). I've seen plenty of desktop GUI applications been built in Qt. I haven't seen that much in Java lately, but I'm sure it exists. Mobile native apps are also very popular.

There is definitely a trend of things moving to web apps, but I don't think its over yet for thick clients. It will probably become ever-more niche though in the coming years.

I think his worries are premature. Thick clients, and java GUI are still a big part of the world and are going to stay a few decades at least. There are even tools like GWT to "be able" to write java swing like stuff in order to be compile in web techs. Native clients still are ahead in terms of capabilities, libraries, performance... and there are already so many that are using it, its an inertia that is going to stay for a while. Java skills are also portable to more hype techs like Android, so I wouldn't worry that much. My 2 cents.

It won't ever be gone. There is a pendulum that keeps swinging back and forth between server-side and client-side.

The pendulum swings about every five years or so, and has done so since the 1960s.

The players are always slightly different, but it seems the grass is always greener on the other side. Look at all the problems we are facing today, many of them could be solved if we moved the processing effort over to the other side.

Old techs also have their advantages. Some banks pay a lot to find good ol' fortran experts because nobody learns this anymore and their software jungle too complicated to change.

We write architectural design software in C++ with Qt. It's a very, very thick client application. We also have a pretty large (and quickly getting larger) iOS application based on Unity written primarily in C# with occasional native code.

I suspect there is a lot more C++/Qt out there than people think. I mentioned that as one technology still in use today, and was greeted with blank stares that seemed to say "Qt? I've never heard of that Javascript library."

But frob, you're right about the client/server pendulum. I'm sure it will swing the other way soon.

There is a bit of thick client out there.

What remains to be seen, is how many companies will start using HTML / JS for a "thick client", which is certainly as expressive as Java / Swing etc, ever was, but offers more convenient (possibly) automatic updating and a better variety of platforms (i.e. it works on iDevices).

The idea of "thin client" was to make the client as dumb as possible - maybe even like a X-terminal or RDP client. This has some advantages but places a lot of load on the server and means you've got a lot of scope for server-side problems. Unix terminals (text-only, like "glass tty") were also a form of thin-client, being extremely dumb but requiring very little comms bandwidth.

So I think HTML is the new thick client.