>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).
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.