Greetings,

With all the existing development towards web development and emerging technologies in that area, I'm left wondering; what is a state of the art way to implement desktop applications in this day and age? If you were to start a new application of considerable size from scratch what technology would you invest your efforts in (focusing on cross platform portability, decent performance and interoperability with existing standards)? I've looked into the Adobe Air platform which appears quite impressive but seems rather limited to support a large application. Would something like Java/SWT still be the sensible choice? Do things like GWT fit the bill?

Thanks

P.S. I'm leaving my question a bit open-ended in an effort to gather diverse answers. Surely this a subjective matter and there is no right and wrong answer.