The biggest problem is deployment. It's fine if you are happy with web start, but if not then creating an .exe isn't trivial. One of the biggest issues relates

The biggest problem is deployment. It's fine if you are happy with web start, but if not then creating an .exe isn't trivial. One of the biggest issues relates the the JVM. Are you going to assume that your users have a particular JVM installed? If so, which one? What if they don't have it? Or you can package the JVM into the exe - although this will make creating that exe more difficult and make it significantly larger. I would love a Java tool that could analyse your app and create an exe that contained a cut-down JVM. Cut-down in that any classes that aren't used (directly or indirectly) are omitted. This is not an easy thing to do given runtime control of class loading.