Pretty much. Java + Eclipse + SWT. In our case it's swing because I don't wanna mess with 100% portability since we're doing webstart.

Eclipse makes Java feel "dynamic" since it auto-compiles with every keystroke. Brilliant stuff, really.

Having said that, our server side will remain in 100% Common Lisp on the JVM. Since it's the part that sees near daily updates, unlike the client GUI which is code and forget.

Your article was an excellent read, so thanks for the link. I generally agree with a lot of what you're saying.

My potential audience is pretty targeted - mainly research scientists and possibly some government workers. They'll likely be more computer savvy than the average user (on average, at least - some scientists I know are just as bad as Grandma.) What I worry about in considering a web app is:

1 - People want to be able to run the software anywhere, any time, without a connection to the internet.

2 - When entering large amounts of data, which is potentially sensitive, into an application, it seems like people would trust a desktop app more.

Number 2 is subjective, but as a scientist myself, I would feel better about a program running on my own machine.

Any thoughts?

The latest version of HTML has the ability to do offline apps. i.e. you write your application in Javascript as a webapp, and it can run offline. You can store data locally in the browser and get javascript notifications when you are back online so you can sync.

Have you worked with any non-Java JVM languages? I can understand your recommendation of the platform for this use case, but the Java language itself seems like a lot of extra pain for minimal gain over Scala or Clojure.

I do not disagree that Java is a major pain in the keister. I played around with JRuby and an MVC framework (Monkeybars) which let you code a Swing app in a more civilized fashion than actually coding Swing apps. The tradeoff is a 20MB hit to your download size, which would have mattered to me back when I started. These days that is less of an issue because folks typically have nigh-ubiquitous high speed Internet access, but there is a fairly straightforward way to take advantage of that which is superior in every fashion.

Patrick, BCC is a web app but you charge a one-time fee, correct? Doesn't that present a structural problem is sales tail off and you're on the hook to spin the servers indefinitely

I get asked that by desktop software people a lot. While the one-time fee wasn't my most brilliant business model move ever, there is no structural problem here. Very, very few of my customers use BCC on a year to year basis. (I have a loyal few dozen, but something like half use it twice or less.) If it became impossible for me to sustain BCC going forward, I'd turn off sales and then gracefully shutdown after six months of notice. If they complain after that, I'll write them a check for their purchase price so that they can use one of my competitors.

However, since software doesn't rot and the BCC monthly server fees are mouse droppings even when it is going gangbusters, I could probably arrange for someone to support it for my entire natural life and beyond.