Help!  I'm working for an almost all Java shop.  However, in the past year
our company had the great idea of buying a company full of vaporwear and
empty promises.  They purchased company was using VB for everything.  Its
product failed miserably.  Now, however, they (that is they want me) to
rewrite it again in .Net using SQLServer.  The application is pure
preprocessing and displaying OLAP (much more suitable for Oracle 10g and
Java than .Net, which is built for ASP content management).  I need some
help is finding successful products out there written in Java for a client
to prove to them that we can build a product in Java.  Strange that the only
division to fail was a VB division yet they won't listen to me when I say
Java can work.

I've already built a few Java applications that are working great for our
company (Swing not SWT), but apparently the guy making the pitch has some
great PR skills.  He's an MS head, and all he can say is "Java is slow" and
"Java is not for the desktop."  This is a guy who wants to wrap data from
the database into XML before going to the GUI and wonders why his app is
having trouble (data of 4k blows up to 64k in XML).

Where can I find samples of reasonably snappy Java GUIs in applications
either as Applets or more importantly as applications.  I'm definitely not
against Java, but in an org with hundreds of developers duign mostly server
solutions, creating a .Net app creates code that is difficult to work with.
Even my argument that half of our clients are on UNIX and the server tie-ins
are in Java are not enough.  He's answer to everything is web services.  Web
services?  Have you seen how slow a web service is?  Try sending 2000 rows
of data across a web service a few hundred times compared to raw text or
binary.  The web service (read XML) doesn't have a change in hell of
competing.

And suggestions would be appreciated.

AG