I'm not signing that petition, because fuck Oracle, and fuck Java in the browser. We don't need it anymore. I hope they keep bloating it until people simply refuse to install it, and even corporate IT departments start saying "what the fuck?" and start porting their software to something else. JavaScript, CSS3, Canvas, even SVG does everything the Java plugin did, but better. Way better.
EDIT: Wow. Didn't realize I felt that strongly until I wrote this. But client-side Java, which I spent many years programming, is a tragedy of epic proportions, and my anger hides a real sadness.
>fuck Java in the browser..
>client-side Java ... is a tragedy of epic proportions
client-side Java != browser jvm
In fact, all of your client-side Java code will run perfectly well without a browser on your Mac, Windows & Linux boxes. I still do a lot of client-side Scala, running on Mac & linux, with no browsers involved at all. The simplest way for a data scientist to process say ~10 GB of records & display linegraphs & scatterplots is like 20 lines of straight client-side Scala, no browser, no html, no CSS3, no JS, no canvas. Throw it in a generalpath & apply an affine transform & you have your curve.(http://bit.ly/WWoaKS). Almost all my work these days is client-side Scala, and I've never used a browser.
That may be, and I'm glad you found an application that works for you, but in general it's far harder to write client-side Java GUIs (in the browser or out) than to write a webapp that does the same thing. Not to mention that it's easier to hire for webapp skills, these days.
In the time it takes to learn GridBagLayout you could have finished your whole project, and the web version is going to be far easier to modify, and your architecture is almost certainly going to make the data easier to access.
When it comes to analyzing big data, I'd do the majority of the crunching server-side, and only pass viz data out to the client (which is always going to be orders-of-magnitude smaller than the source data).
It's already happening. Our desktop support IT guy came by to do some updates to my computer and he asked me if I wouldn't mind if he uninstalled Java. I said sure, no problem.
If we removed the stranglehold that incompetent people had over corporate spending decisions then maybe this just might happen.
Unfortunately, I think we're still a decade or so away from having technologically enlightened people saturated throughout our corporate landscape for that to happen.
Until then, we're stuck with know-nothing managers who make decisions based on how likely they are to get fired if things go wrong:
EDIT: Wow. Didn't realize I felt that strongly until I wrote this. But client-side Java, which I spent many years programming, is a tragedy of epic proportions, and my anger hides a real sadness.