The Science Archives and VO Team (SAT) has undertaken the effort to build state of the art sub-systems for its new generation of archives. At the time of writing this abstract, the new technology has already been applied to the creation of the SOHO and EXOSAT Science Archive s and will be used to re-engineer some of the already existing ESA Science Archives in the future. The Graphical User Interface sub-system has been designed and developed upon the premises of building a lightweight rich client application to query and retrieve scientific data quickly and efficiently; special attention has been paid to the usability and ergonomics of the interface. The system architecture relies on the Model View Controller pattern, which isolates logic from the graphical interface. Multiple window layout arrangements are possible using a docking windows framework with virtually no limitations (InfoNode). New graphical components have been developed to fulfill project-specific user requirements. For example video animations can be generated at runtime based on image data requests matching a specific search criteria. In addition, interoperability is achieved with other tools for data visualization purposes using internationally approved standards (c.f., IVOA SAMP), a messaging protocol already adopted by several analysis tools (ds9, Aladin, Gaia). In order to avoid the increasingly common network constraints affecting the end-user's daily work the system has been designed to cope with possible restrictive firewall set up. Therefore, ESA New Generation archives are accessible from anyplace where standard basic port 80 HTTP connections are available.