IRIS (Interactive Rich Imaging Software) was one of the most impressive demos at last year's JavaOne conference. It mixes applets with AJAX to provide a photo viewer and editing tool that connects to Flickr to allow you to see slideshows, edit photos and upload photos to your Flickr account.I'm not certain about the division of labour between the applet and JavaScript, but I'm fairly sure that the applet is handling most of the communications as well as the 3D graphics (via JOGL).
The slideshow transitions are nicely done.
http://swinglabs.java.sun.com/iris/ (requires Java 6 to run)
