I'm sooo tired of writing WebApps with HTML frontend: Spending weeks with forms, scriptlets, taglibs and that stuff, while ending up with a client that just look aweful. Nothing has changed within the last 8 years...
Oh yes, I usually add some AJAX gimmicks (I prefer Dojo) to make the GUI less painful, but from the developer's view, Javascript is even worse...
I will start my search for state-of-the-art browser applications that integrate with J2EE backends with Adobe's Flex framework: